Week 5. 10 Reading Comprehension Strategies

10 Reading Comprehension Strategies All Students Need

Why Addressing Reading Comprehension Is Necessary

by Melissa Kelly

Updated January 16, 2019

Here are ten (10) effective tips and strategies that teachers can share with students to improve their comprehension of a text.

01 of 10

Generate Questions

A good strategy to teach all readers is that instead of just rushing through a passage or chapter,  is to pause and generate questions. These can either be questions about what has just happened or what they think might happen in the future. Doing this can help them focus on the main ideas and increase the student's engagement with the material.

After reading, students can go back and write questions that could be included in a quiz or test on the material. This will require them to look at the information in a different manner. By asking questions in this way, students can help the teacher correct misconceptions. This method also provides immediate feedback.

02 of 10

Read Aloud and Monitor

While some might think of a teacher reading aloud in a secondary classroom as an elementary practice, there is evidence that reading aloud also benefits middle and high school students as well. Most importantly, by reading aloud teachers can model good reading behavior.

Reading aloud to students should also include stops to check for understanding. Teachers can demonstrate their own think-aloud or interactive elements and focus intentionally on the meaning “within the text,” “about the text,” and “beyond the text” (Fountas & Pinnell, 2006) These interactive elements can push students for deeper thought around a big idea. Discussions after reading aloud can support conversations in class that help students make critical connections.

03 of 10

Promote Cooperative Talk

Having students stop periodically to turn and talk in order to discuss what has just been read can reveal any issues with understanding. Listening to students can inform instruction and help a teacher to can reinforce what is being taught.

This is a useful strategy that can be used after a read aloud (above) when all students have a shared experience in listening to a text.

This kind of cooperative learning, where students learn reading strategies reciprocally, is one of the most powerful instructional tools.

04 of 10

Attention to Text Structure

An excellent strategy that soon becomes second nature is to have struggling students read through all the headings and subheadings in any chapter that they have been assigned. They can also look at the pictures and any graphs or charts. This information can help them gain an overview of what they will be learning as they read the chapter.

The same attention to text structure can be applied in reading literary works that use a story structure. Students can use the elements in a story's structure (setting, character, plot, etc) as a means of helping them recall story content.

05 of 10

Take Notes or Annotate Texts

Students should read with paper and pen in hand. They can then take notes of things they predict or understand. They can write down questions. They can create a vocabulary list of all the highlighted words in the chapter along with any unfamiliar terms that they need to define. Taking notes is also helpful in preparing students for later discussions in class.

Annotations in a text, writing in the margins or highlighting, is another powerful way to record understanding. This strategy is ideal for handouts.

Using sticky notes can allow students to record information from a text without damaging the text. Sticky notes can also be removed and organized later for responses to a text.

06 of 10

Use Context Clues

Students need to use the hints that an author provides in a text. Students may need to look at context clues, that is a word or phrase directly before or after  a word they may not know.

Context clues may be in the form of:

Roots and affixes: origin of the word;

Contrast: recognizing how word is compared or contrasted with another word in the sentence;

Logic: considering the rest of the sentence to understand an unknown word;

Definition: using a provided explanation that follows the word;

Example or Illustration: literal or visual representation of the word;

Grammar: determining how the word functions in a sentence to better understand its meaning.

07 of 10

Use Graphic Organizers

Some students find that graphic organizers like webs and concept maps can greatly enhance reading comprehension. These allow students to identify areas of focus and main ideas in a reading. By filling in this information, students can deepen their understanding of the author's meaning.

By the time students are in grades 7-12,  teachers should allow students to decide which graphic organizer would be most helpful to them in understanding a text. Giving students the opportunity to generate representations of the material is part of the reading comprehension process.

08 of 10

Practice PQ4R

This consists of four steps: Preview, Question, Read, Reflect, Recite, and Review.

Preview has students scan the material to get an overview. The question means that students should ask themselves questions as they read.

The four R's have students read the material, reflect on what has just been read, recite the major points to help learn better, and then return to the material and see if you can answer the questions previously asked.

This strategy works well when coupled with notes and annotations.

09 of 10

Summarizing

As they read, students should be encouraged to stop periodically stop their reading and summarize what they have just read. In creating a summary, students have to integrate the most important ideas and generalize from the text information. They need to distill the important ideas from the unimportant or irrelevant elements.

This practice of integrating and generalizing in the creation of summaries make long passages more understandable.

10 of 10

Monitor Understanding

Some students prefer to annotate, while others are more comfortable summarizing, but all students must learn how to be aware of how they read. They need to know how fluently and accurate they are reading a text, but they also need to know how they can determine their own understanding of the materials.

They should decide which strategies are most helpful in making meaning, and practice those strategies, adjusting the strategies when necessary.