Reading Comprehension Strategies

Teaching Reading
National Reading Panel
Reading Comprehension Strategies

Strategies that can help improve text comprehension.

Monitoring Comprehension

To understand what you are reading, one must learn how to be aware of understanding what you are reading. Teaching metacognition strategies help students learn ways to understand what they are reading before, during, and after reading required information. Before reading, students need to understand the purpose for reading. They also need to review what they will be reading. During reading, students need to monitor what they do understand and what they do not understand to fix any problems they might have in understanding what they are reading. After reading, they will need to have graphic organizers to help them check understanding of what they have read.
Before Reading: • Predict what the text will be about • Connecting reading to background knowledge • Set purpose of reading by creating sensory images
During Reading: • Asking questions • Drawing inferences • Determining what 's important • Synthesizing ideas • Solving problems

After Reading: • Summarize • Evaluate the ideas • Make applications

Using Graphic and Semantic Organizers

Graphic organizers allow students to visualize important concepts from required reading materials in the classroom. When students are assigned reading from a teacher, there should be an understanding of why they are reading what is assigned. With so much information, especially in expository text material, there needs to be a focus on what the teacher wants the students to learn. Graphic organizers enable teachers to help students focus on text structure as they read. Another important reason for giving students graphic organizers is that it enables students to visualize connections between the relationships within a text. With the graphic organizer, students are able to clarify what they are supposed to be learning. Also graphic organizers help students write well-organized summaries of a text. Semantic organizers are graphic organizers that organize information from a text in a spider web format. Using these formats to teach students information gives teachers a visual representation of what they want students to learn allowing students to see what they need to learn. Graphic organizers help teachers teach and students learn.

Students Answering and Generating Questions

During this strategy, teachers must understand how to get students to want to answer and ask questions to help them focus on what the teacher wants them to learn. When questioning techniques are done properly, it motivates all students in a classroom to want to learn the lesson that the teacher has assigned. Questions are not only important to students but questioning students and having students ask questions is also extremely important to the teacher to be able to check for understanding and provide feedback.

Recognizing Text Structure

Students are taught to use the structure of a story to help them recall important story content.

Summarizing

Students are taught how to put the main ideas of a text into their own words.

Cooperative Learning

Teaching students to learn the above strategies together.

Methods for teaching comprehension strategies

• Direct explanation should be used by teachers to inform students what type of comprehension strategy to use, why the strategy will help them understand what they are reading, and in what situation to apply the strategy. • Modeling is used by the teacher to show students how to use a particular strategy by modeling their thinking process while reading the text with the class. • Guided Practice should be used by teachers to encourage student inquiry and help students learn how and when to apply a strategy while they are learning how to comprehend better ways of understanding what they are reading. • Application allows students to practice strategies while the teacher helps them until they can apply strategies independently. These methods help to keep students engaged in what they are learning. • Cooperative learning enables students to get together in-groups, each with students of different levels of ability, to learn comprehension strategies together. Students are expected to learn strategies and help each other learn the strategies while the teacher demonstrates the strategies to be learned. • Reciprocal teaching is used while student and teacher work together to understand literature and informational texts. This multiple strategy instruction enables students to learn how to incorporate several strategies to help them understand what they are reading. The four strategies that are used in reciprocal teaching is asking questions, summarizing, clarifying misunderstandings, and predicting.

References

National Reading Panel (2003). Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read, Comprehension Strategies. Retrieved May 26, 2006, at: http://www.nifl.gov/partnershipforreading/publications/Cierra.pdf

References: National Reading Panel (2003). Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read, Comprehension Strategies. Retrieved May 26, 2006, at: http://www.nifl.gov/partnershipforreading/publications/Cierra.pdf