Reading Comprehension

Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension

1. Monitoring comprehension

Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. They have strategies to "fix" problems in their understanding as the problems arise. Research shows that instruction, even in the early grades, can help students become better at monitoring their comprehension.
Comprehension monitoring instruction teaches students to:
a. Be aware of what they do understan
b. Identify what they do not understand.
c. Use appropriate strategies to resolve problems in comprehension.


2. Metacognition

Metacognition can be defined as "thinking about thinking." Good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and have control over their reading. Before reading, they might clarify their purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, they might monitor their understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text and "fixing" any comprehension problems they have. After reading, they check their understanding of what they read.
Students may use several comprehension monitoring strategies
   a. Identify where the difficulty occurs."I don't understand the second paragraph on page 76. 
   b. Identify what the difficulty is
    "I don't get what the author means when she says, 'Arriving in America was a milestone in my grandmother's life.'"
c. Restate the difficult sentence or passage in their own words
"Oh, so the author means that coming to America was a very important event in her grandmother's life."
Look back through the text
"The author talked about Mr. McBride in Chapter 2, but I don't remember much about him. Maybe if I reread that chapter, I can figure out why he's acting this way.
d. Look forward in the text for information that might help them to resolve the difficulty
"The text says, 'The groundwater may form a stream or pond or create a wetland. People can
also bring groundwater to the surface.' Hmm, I don't understand how people can do that… Oh, the next section is called 'Wells.' I'll read this section to see if it tells how they do it."

3. Graphic and semantic organizers

Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and relationships between concepts in a text or using diagrams. Graphic organizers are known by different names, such as maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters. Regardless of the label, graphic organizers can help readers focus on concepts and how they are related to other concepts. Graphic organizers help students read and understand textbooks and picture books.

4. Answering questions

Questions can be effective because they:
        a. Give students a purpose for reading
        b.  Focus students' attention on what they are to learn
        c. Help students to think actively as they read
        d.Encourage students to monitor their comprehension
        e.  Help students to review content and relate what they have learned to what they already know.
The Question-Answer Relationship strategy (QAR) encourages students to learn how to answer questions better. Students are asked to indicate whether the information they used to answer questions about the text was textually explicit information (information that was directly stated in the text), textually implicit information (information that was implied in the text), or information entirely from the student's own background knowledge.

5. Generating questions

By generating questions, students become aware of whether they can answer the questions and if they understand what they are reading. Students learn to ask themselves questions that require them to combine information from different segments of text. For example, students can be taught to ask main idea questions that relate to important information in a text.

6. Recognizing story structure

In story structure instruction, students learn to identify the categories of content (characters, setting, events, problem, resolution). Often, students learn to recognize story structure through the use of story maps. Instruction in story structure improves students' comprehension.

7. Summarizing

Summarizing requires students to determine what is important in what they are reading and to put it into their own words. Instruction in summarizing helps students:
       a.  Identify or generate main ideas
       b. Connect the main or central ideas
       c. Eliminate unnecessary information
       d.  Remember what they read