reading comprehension strategies

Essential Reading Comprehension Strategies for students and teachers

Learning to read is a complex skill that demands a lot from our students.

Once students have moved on from the relatively piece of cake process of decoding the words on the page and are able to read with a level of fluency and automaticity, increasing demands are made upon their power to cover their reading at evermore complex levels.

One minute they're existence asked to unravel the threads of pregnant in a Shakespearean tragedy, the next to wrap their brains around the hard science in a Physics textbook.

There's no dubiousness about information technology, research (non to mention experience) reveals to us that students require more than than a single comprehension strategy to go confident and proficient readers.

In this article, nosotros will examine vii cognitive strategies that you can utilise in the classroom to help your students improve their overall reading comprehension.

We'll likewise look at how these strategies can be taught in the classroom and provide yous with a straightforward activeness to become your students started using the strategies correct away.

WHAT IS READING COMPREHENSION?

Comprehension is the procedure of agreement text: spoken, written and/or visual. Comprehension is an active and complex process that encompasses.

  • Simultaneously extracting and amalgam pregnant from text.
  • Enabling readers to derive meaning from text when they engage in intentional, trouble solving and thinking processes.
  • Applying social, cultural and intellectual layers upon text to infer meaning from it.

The teaching of comprehension from the early years of schooling is an important component of whatever literacy program as it teaches students to recall about reading more than than merely producing sounds and relaying information.

THE vii ESSENTIAL READING COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES

The 7 reading comprehension strategies nosotros'll look at in this article are:

  • Monitoring
  • Visualising
  • Activating
  • Questioning
  • Inferring
  • Summarising
  • Determining Importance

Now, permit's take a await at each of these in turn.

1. MONITORING COMPREHENSION STRATEGY

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What is the Monitoring Comprehension Strategy? Put simply, monitoring refers to the procedure of assessing your understanding of something as you lot read it. It requires you to pay attention to your ain thinking every bit you read a text. As with all of our reading strategies, this requires students to develop their metacognition – thinking nearly thinking.

Employing this strategy asks us to detect our own thoughts and filter through them to identify what is new in our reading, what questions arise, what background knowledge practise we have and what are inferences that nosotros are making as we read.

Monitoring requires us to do all this and observe how it all weaves together to help us unravel the meaning of a text.

Essentially, the monitoring comprehension strategy requires united states of america to pay close attention and discover not just the text we are reading, but our own thoughts about and observations on the text too.

Done diligently, the monitoring comprehension strategy encourages the reader to assess their agreement of a text on an ongoing ground.

This allows them to brand adjustments to their approach to a text as necessary, ensuring they don't mindlessly scan through a text without understanding what they've read. A student who is using this strategy will be an engaged pupil aware of their electric current level of understanding and ability to respond accordingly.

Though the monitoring comprehension strategy is only one of the strategies we volition explore in this commodity, it can be idea of equally a kind of overarching strategy that tin encompass aspects of all the other strategies within information technology.

How Tin I Teach the Monitoring Comprehension Strategy in the Classroom? The earliest method of employing this strategy is most often reading aloud with our students. We encourage interactivity while doing this. We model thinking about the text as we read together, eventually passing over the responsibility for thinking about the text to our students.

To exercise this, encourage your students to read with partners, to ask questions of each other, and to draw and write about what they've read. This encourages the student to recollect consciously almost their reading and their comprehension of it.

Be sure likewise to expose them to a wide range of genres; both fiction and nonfiction. With plenty do, your students will brainstorm to apply this strategy independently and automatically each time they read.

2. VISUALIZATION COMPREHENSION STRATEGY

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What Is the Visualization Comprehension Strategy? Visualization involves the structure of mental images with the purpose of cartoon meaning from a text. When engaged in visualization, students will course pictures in their minds of what they have read as they read it.

Withal, visualization is perhaps a poor proper name for this strategy with its suggestion of 'seeing' lone. Visualization is really about engaging more than just our sense of sight. Students who are adept at using this strategy will not only brand mental images in their minds, but they'll conjure upwards in their imaginations the smells, sounds, feel, and tastes of what they read besides.

How Can I Teach the Visualization Comprehension Strategy in the Classroom? The best method of instruction this strategy to your students is to use straight modeling. Begin past reading aloud a familiar story. As you read, describe to the students the mental images that you lot grade in your mind.

Once you accept given students an insight into your thought processes while reading, and so challenge individual students to take a go themselves with brusk passages, They should read a sentence or two to begin with, then describe the images in their minds as they read them. They should continue in this manner until they complete the passage.

With time, this too will go 2nd nature to the students as some other string is added to their bow.

3. ACTIVATING PRIOR KNOWLEDGE COMPREHENSION STRATEGY

What Is the Activating Prior Knowledge Comprehension Strategy? This comprehension strategy encourages students to brand connections between what they're reading and their own experiences. In the procedure, the student's reading becomes more than personally meaningful.

Prior knowledge is the knowledge that students take already. It's what the student brings to their reading. The more prior knowledge they have in whatever given expanse, the meliorate able they'll be to encompass what they read.

As students learn to make connections between the things they read and their ain lives, they will begin to develop a scaffold on which they can hang new ideas and concepts.

How Can I Teach the Activating Prior Knowledge Comprehension Strategy in the Classroom? This strategy begins even before the book is opened. Showtime, ask the students to preview the volume. Examine the encompass and hash out what they encounter at that place. Flip through the pages of the book together and read the blurb on the dorsum. Discuss with the students what they think the book might exist about based on their observations.

Every bit you read through the book, encourage students to point out when they read something they know already. What else do they know about this topic? Can they share what they know with the course?

As with all the strategies in this article, activating prior knowledge gets us thinking about reading, it is a metacognitive skill as well as a skill that is reliant on the educatee'due south own noesis and experience.

4. QUESTIONING COMPREHENSION STRATEGY

What Is the Questioning Comprehension Strategy? This comprehension strategy encourages students to remember critically about what they read, as well as helps students to develop their own sense of curiosity. Just every bit nosotros ask our students questions in order to stimulate their thinking, students inquire themselves questions nigh a text to boot offset their exploration of the text in pursuit of agreement. Questioning ensures students engage closely with a text, making reading more than just a passive pursuit in the procedure.

How Can I Teach the Questioning Comprehension Strategy in the Classroom? Instruct students that questioning should accept identify before, during, and after their reading. It will provide them with purpose and focus for their reading. In this strategy, students will ask questions for several reasons, including to clarify meaning (What does this word hateful? Why did that happen?), to understand the events and characters better (Why did she do that? What would happen if…?), and to understand the writer's purpose (Why did they write that?).

Asking questions is particularly important when a student finds themself not understanding what is happening. Request clarification questions helps the student to seek out the information required to make their comprehension clearer.

5. INFERRING COMPREHENSION STRATEGY

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What Is the Inferring Comprehension Strategy? Using this strategy requires the student to get something of a textual detective. Information technology helps students to sympathize things that are not made explicit in the text. It's what we hateful when nosotros say to students "Read between the lines!"

Rather than merely relying on what the writer has articulated straight in the text, inferring pregnant requires the student to look for clues to figure out the meaning behind the text. This demands disquisitional thinking on the part of the student and pushes the student to a college level of comprehension.

How Tin I Teach the Inferring Comprehension Strategy in the Classroom? Every bit with previous strategies, learning to use inferring as a comprehension strategy begins with instructor modeling. Choose a section of suitable text, display the text on a whiteboard or give students copies of it, and read aloud with students. At appropriate points in the text, intermission and ask the students what they call up is actually going on. Teachers should then provide their answer, modeling for the students as they do so which clues in the text led them to their decision.

SOME USEFUL PROMPTS FOR ENCOURAGING INFERENCE INCLUDE:

  • What'south really going on hither?
  • How do you call back the character feels?
  • Why do y'all think that happened?
  • How practice you know that?
  • What clues led you to that conclusion?

half dozen. Summarizing Comprehension Strategy

What Is the Summarizing Comprehension Strategy? Summarizing means that students retell the story or data in the text they've read in their own words. To practise this successfully, they need to exist able to pull out the main points of the text and express these in their own words. To summarize effectively, the educatee must express the gist of the text. This requires them to identify the essential ideas and consolidate the near important elements of the text that support these ideas.

How Tin can I Teach the Summarizing Comprehension Strategy in the Classroom? There are many activities to aid students gain valuable exercise at summarizing their reading. 1 fun activity that can be used is the $2 Sum Upwards. In this activity each word costs 10c and the student only has $2, to sum upward the main idea of their reading.

This game is fun, simply information technology also helps push the student to gain a articulate grasp of the material they've been tasked to summarize. It also offers the student a good opportunity for writing practice as information technology forces the student to keep their writing lean and tight.

vii. Determining Importance Comprehension Strategy

What Is the Determining Importance Comprehension Strategy? At that place is a sorting process that students must learn if they are to successfully navigate their manner through the ocean of words that expect them. They'll demand to learn to continuously prioritize the information that they come across when reading. In the determining importance reading comprehension strategy, students look for clues in the text to help them sort the $.25 of data in the text into a hierarchy of relative value.

How Can I Teach the Determining Importance Comprehension Strategy in the Classroom? Determining importance demands that the student pays attention to all elements of the text. They must analyze everything from headings and bullet points, to the language used in the text right down to the word level.

 A simple way to practise this in class is to provide the students with Mail-It notes. After reading a provided text, students should brand notes of the various $.25 of information in the text on the Post-It notes. When they accept done this they can sort the bits of information according to their overall importance relative to each other.

Plow Over a New Leaf

So, there we have information technology, vii reading comprehension strategies to help students become to grips with even the most complex of texts.

Pedagogy these strategies to your students can ensure they have enough tools in their toolbox to 'fix' their comprehension of most texts they'll be asked to read. If i strategy fails, and then they pull out the next ane until they have eventually achieved a solid understanding of the text.

While working on improving student reading comprehension, information technology is important to remind them that the route to condign a proficient reader demands that they don't just give up at the first hurdle to agreement. Nor should they plough onwards regardless of the fact the pregnant of the text has eluded them either.

With exercise and over time, proficient readers develop competency in a range of strategies that they tin alternating betwixt to unlock the meaning of even the virtually opaque of texts.

Content for this page has been written by Shane Mac Donnchaidh.  A former principal of an international schoolhouse and university English lecturer with 15 years of education and administration experience. Shane'south latest Volume the Complete Guide to Nonfiction Writing can be plant hither.  Editing and support for this article have been provided by the literacyideas team.