Mastering Reading Comprehension: Techniques and Strategies for All Learners

Reading comprehension is the cornerstone of effective learning and communication. It's more than just recognizing words; it's about deeply understanding and grasping the meaning of a text. This article explores various techniques and strategies to enhance reading comprehension skills for learners of all ages and abilities.

The Essence of Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension is the ability to deeply understand and grasp text using prior knowledge, educated analysis, and predictions. Achieving reading comprehension feels effortless to experienced readers, but it’s actually a complex, active process of constructing meaning. Without reading comprehension, sentences are just words on a page without any further meaning.

The Building Blocks of Reading Comprehension

Several foundational skills contribute to strong reading comprehension. These include:

Decoding and Fluency: The ability to break down words by understanding the connection between letters and sounds. Fluency and decoding go together.
Vocabulary Development: A broad and cohesive vocabulary is essential for comprehending the meaning of words within a text.
Text Structure and Features: Recognizing how sentences are written and how they work together within the whole text.
Background Knowledge: Information readers use from past experience to better understand the text they’re reading.

Active Reading: Engaging with the Text

Research indicates that actively engaging with texts leads to better retention. Active reading involves employing strategies that force the brain to interact with the text before, during, and after reading.

Before Reading

Engaging with a text before reading can crucially boost understanding and retention. Determine your purpose for reading and what you need to be able to understand, know, or do after reading. Think about how the reading relates to other course topics, and ask why your professor might have assigned the text. Give the text an initial glance, noting headings, diagrams, tables, pictures, bolded words, summaries, and key questions. Consider reading introductions and conclusions to gather main ideas.

Read also: Understanding PLCs

During Reading

Keeping your brain active and engaged while you read decreases distractions, mind-wandering, and confusion. As soon as you notice your mind drifting, STOP and consider your needs. Do you need a break? Do you need a more active way to engage with the text? Do you need background noise or movement? What about a change of environment?

After Reading

Whether you read a printed text or an online document, the most important thing to assess is how much you understood from your reading. Try “cross-referencing” the information you read with simpler writings on the same subject and discussing your takeaways with peers. If any information remains unclear, locate other resources related to the topic such as a trusted video source or web-based study guide. Still have questions you can’t answer on your own? Make note of them to ask a professor, TA, or classmate.

Metacognitive Strategies: Thinking About Thinking

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 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.

Comprehension Monitoring Strategies

Students may use several comprehension monitoring strategies:

Read also: Learning Resources Near You

Identify where the difficulty occurs: “I don’t understand the second paragraph on page 76.”
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.’”
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 now.”
Look forward in the text: “The text says, ‘The groundwater may form a stream or pond or create a wetland.’ Maybe if I read on, I'll understand what it means."

Graphic Organizers: Visualizing Concepts

Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and relationships between concepts in a text 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 and provide students with tools they can use to examine and show relationships in a text. They also help students write well-organized summaries of a text.

Types of Graphic Organizers

Venn Diagrams: Used to compare or contrast information from two sources.
Storyboard/Chain of Events: Used to order or sequence events within a text.
Story Map: Used to chart the story structure, defining characters, setting, events, problem, and resolution in a fiction story, or main idea and details in a nonfiction story.
Cause/Effect: Used to illustrate the cause and effects told within a text.

Questioning Techniques: Engaging with the Author

Questions can be effective because they give students a purpose for reading, focus students’ attention on what they are to learn, help students to think actively as they read, encourage students to monitor their comprehension, and help students to review content and relate what they have learned to what they already know. 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.

The Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) Strategy

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.

Types of Questions

"Right There" Questions: Questions found right in the text that ask students to find the one right answer located in one place as a word or a sentence in the passage.
"Think and Search" Questions: Questions based on the recall of facts that can be found directly in the text. Answers are typically found in more than one place, thus requiring students to “think” and “search” through the passage to find the answer.
"Author and You" Questions: Questions require students to use what they already know, with what they have learned from reading the text. Students must understand the text and relate it to their prior knowledge before answering the question.
"On Your Own" Questions: Questions are answered based on a student’s prior knowledge and experiences. Reading the text may not be helpful to them when answering this type of question.

Story Structure Instruction: Understanding Narrative Elements

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.

Summarization: Condensing Information

Summarizing requires students to determine what is important in what they are reading and to put it into their own words.

Read also: Learning Civil Procedure

Explicit Instruction: A Structured Approach

Research shows that explicit teaching techniques are particularly effective for comprehension strategy instruction. In explicit instruction, teachers tell readers why and when they should use strategies, what strategies to use, and how to apply them.

Steps of Explicit Instruction

Direct Explanation: The teacher explains to students why the strategy helps comprehension and when to apply the strategy.
Modeling: The teacher models, or demonstrates, how to apply the strategy, usually by “thinking aloud” while reading the text that the students are using.
Guided Practice: The teacher guides and assists students as they learn how and when to apply the strategy.
Application: The teacher helps students practice the strategy until they can apply it independently.

Cooperative Learning: Collaborative Comprehension

Effective comprehension strategy instruction can be accomplished through cooperative learning, which involves students working together as partners or in small groups on clearly defined tasks. Students work together to understand texts, helping each other learn and apply comprehension strategies. Teachers help students learn to work in groups.

Additional Strategies to Enhance Reading Comprehension

1. Using Metacognition

Metacognition means “thinking about thinking.” Students can use metacognition strategies before, during, and after reading to track their comprehension of a text. Before reading, they may set a purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, students may adjust their approach to ensure they comprehend the main idea and details, such as rereading a sentence or reading more slowly and carefully. After reading, students can assess their understanding of what they’ve read, typically with a teacher-recommended assignment or assessment.

2. Activating Prior Knowledge

When a student activates prior knowledge, they use what they already know to make sense of a new text that they read. It includes both their own life experiences and things they’ve learned in the past as a framework for comprehending new information.

3. Building Background Knowledge

Teachers can help bridge gaps in students' prior knowledge by building background knowledge about a text and its topics before and during a lesson. This strategy scaffolds students into the new material, enabling them to make sense of what they’re reading.

4. Previewing a Text

Using prior and background knowledge as a guide, students can preview a text before they read. Previewing allows students to become familiar with the structure and content of the piece before engaging in close reading.

5. Predicting

Making predictions about a text before students read helps them activate their background and prior knowledge and tap into metacognition. It encourages them to use what they already know and set up a framework for thinking about the text as they read. As they gain more knowledge, students may revise their predictions based on new evidence.

6. Self-Monitoring Comprehension

Students who can monitor their comprehension know when they read something they understand and when they don’t. The earlier students can learn this comprehension skill, the sooner they’ll be able to form a deeper understanding of texts and feel empowered to practice and read independently.

7. Using "Fix-Ups"

When students work to master self-monitoring their comprehension, they also learn how to use “fix-up” strategies. When they read something they don’t understand, they use tools or strategies to help them fill the gaps on their own.

8. Recognizing Story or Text Structure

Students learn to start identifying parts of a story’s structure as early as preschool or kindergarten. If they can identify what type of text structure they’re reading, they have more clues about how the information is organized and where the main idea and key details could be within the text.

9. Using Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers help show concepts or relationships visually. There are various types of graphic organizers that students can use to visualize concepts in text, such as maps, charts, webs, or graphs.

10. Visualizing

Studies show that students who can visualize what they read have better comprehension and recall than those who can’t. Having students use all five senses when they read can enhance their visualization skills.

11. Answering Questions

The Question-Answer Relationship strategy (QAR) helps students learn how to answer questions more effectively. It encourages students to share whether the information they used to answer a question came directly from the text, if it was implied in the text, or if they answered based on their background knowledge.

12. Asking Questions

After students learn how to answer certain types of questions, they can start asking their own. Rather than waiting for a teacher to ask guiding comprehension questions, students can ask themselves if they can find key details or the main idea of a passage.

13. Determining Key Details

To understand a text, students should be able to determine what’s truly important in a story instead of just what’s interesting.

14. Making Inferences

Authors don’t always explicitly state everything they want a reader to know in the text. We have to read between the lines to understand what they mean and make connections. During and after reading, students can make inferences about things the author doesn’t say outright.

15. Summarizing

Summarizing requires students to decide what’s important when reading and share it in their own words. When summarizing expository texts, students should be able to share the main idea of a passage and the key details that support it.

16. Retelling

Having students retell a story in their own words forces them to analyze the content, decide what’s important, and share that information with others orally, in writing, or through another means of expression.

17. Reading Aloud

Reading aloud helps integrate auditory and visual processing into the reading process. When they use this strategy, students aren’t just reading the words on the page to themselves. Instead, they also hear the words, the inflection of the sentences, and construct meaning through this channel.

18. Repeated Reading

Reading a text once may not be enough to understand it and construct meaning. Repeated reading helps build fluency, accuracy, and confidence when learning to read. When reading to learn, it provides more opportunities to understand and analyze the content, uncovering meanings or text connections that students may have missed during their first read.

Specific Reading Comprehension Strategies

SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review): A reading comprehension strategy that encourages students to think about what they are reading while they are reading.
Chunking: A reading strategy that breaks down challenging text into more manageable pieces.
Close Reading: A strategy that requires critical analysis of a short but complex text.
KWL Chart (Know, Want to Know, Learned): A research-based reading strategy that activates students’ prior knowledge, sets a purpose for reading, and helps monitor comprehension.
Jigsaw: A collaborative strategy that allows students to help each other build comprehension.
Mind Mapping: Requires students to complete a diagram or graphic organizer to visualize the reading and connect ideas.
Reciprocal Teaching: Encourages students to think critically about a text using four reading comprehension strategies: questioning, clarifying, summarizing, and predicting.
Think-Pair-Share: A strategy that gives students time and structure to formulate and share ideas.
GIST (Generating Interactions between Schemata and Text): A strategy for establishing comprehension of a text. It encourages students to write concise, meaningful summaries.

Strategies for English Language Learners (ELLs)

Reading comprehension influences whether EL students can understand content across subject areas. Reading content in a familiar language may serve as a bridge for comprehension in English. Prior to a lesson, allow Spanish-speaking students to take books home and read about the topic in Spanish. Later, during whole-group instruction, point out pertinent information such as titles, headings, vocabulary in bold print, captions, graphs, and pictures that help depict what she is reading.

The Importance of Early Language and Literacy Skills

Children begin building foundational skills that support reading comprehension from birth. Oral language comprehension precedes reading comprehension. Not all children get the same amount or richness of exposure to oral language in the infant and toddler years, and this has consequences for reading and general cognitive abilities later on.

Ways to Build Language Skills

Ask questions and have conversations: Asking questions, especially open-ended ones, gives children a chance to practice understanding and producing the forms and structures of language.
Narrating Actions: The more language children hear, the better! Narrating actions is a simple way to use language in context for the benefit of your child.
Build vocabulary: Parents are well-positioned to build their children’s vocabulary by using a wide variety of words when they talk to them.
Build print awareness and love of books: An important part of the literacy process is learning how books work and discovering the joy that both books and stories can bring us.

Making Book-Reading a Participatory Activity

Whether the child is eight years old or in eighth grade, you can’t go wrong by asking them questions about the story. Stop at the end of each page when reading a familiar bedtime story together. Ask, “What do you think will happen next? Why?” Try the same with a new book.

Using Illustrations

The illustrations in a picture book are a helpful resource for understanding the story. When caregivers draw the child’s attention to the illustrations, they’re showing her that just like in spoken language, what you hear connects to what you see.

Bringing the Story to Life

Acting out fun, action-packed stories is not only a fun exercise for children; it also encourages making an inference from context clues.

Practicing Basic Book Handling

Part of what we know when we know how to read is the way in which text is organized. When parents read to their children and use some basic teaching strategies, children pick up on this important knowledge that most adults take for granted.

tags: #learning #comprehension #skills #techniques