For students learning to read correctly for the first time, the difficulty curve from understanding to complicated reading skills and strategies can be difficult.
Classroom
Top Strategies for Reading Comprehension
For students learning to read correctly for the first time, the difficulty curve from understanding to complicated reading skills and strategies can be difficult.
As an educator, you must take those developing reading comprehension skills and nurture them into fully-fledged reading fans. These top strategies for reading comprehension are just a few ways to implement these vital skills in the classroom, with a list of reading strategies included to get you started the right way.
Read on now to find out more about reading and comprehending text – including why these skills are so important for your students:
Education resources
What makes reading comprehension skills so important?
Before we look at the top strategy for reading comprehension, we must know why this skill is so valuable. According to Reading Rockets, comprehension isn’t just a useful skill for students – it’s also a vital part of a child’s wider life, from how they gain knowledge to the enjoyment they receive from reading. These are just a few of the reasons why a good level of reading comprehension skills is so important:
- Good reading comprehension allows students to understand the meaning behind words, which provides a way to connect with and understand the writing more deeply, according to K12 Reader.
- Comprehension supports other vital reading skills, such as fluency and fasts or skim reading, all of which are important for greater knowledge retention and faster learning
- Students that have an excellent comprehension of what they are reading are far more likely to be immersed in stories and tales – which can be an excellent way for them to expand their minds and enjoy new worlds and places
- Comprehension is required to gather information from text, even for the most technical subjects such as Math and Science – it’s a multifaceted skill that has countless uses every day.
Now we know why: reading comprehension is such an important skill; we can look at some of the strategies designed for the classroom. With this insight and a little practice, your students could soon be excellent in their reading comprehension skills learning.
Predicting
An easy and practical way to kick off reading sessions, asking your class to predict what will happen in a text or a story based on the title or blurb is a fantastic way to challenge their understanding versus their reading. By anticipating what they feel a story will be about, students can set up their expectations for the text. These expectations must then be revised and adapted as the information they have becomes more accessible and plentiful.
By the end of the story or passage of text, your students should have a completely different opinion about what the text was about than they did at the start. To add more to this activity, teachers could encourage students to summarise predictions for various short stories based on their titles or covers and then follow up with short essay questions on how their perspective and understanding changed once they completed each story.
Questioning
To further develop a student’s understanding of the meaning of the text, questioning is a fantastic strategy. Both encouraging students to ask questions – and to answer their own – is an excellent way to encourage them to think about what a particular piece of text means. Educators can support this process by providing their questions and helping students refer back to the text when needed. The idea of questioning is that it expands knowledge and cements an understanding of meaning within all sorts of writing.
To expand on this strategy, teachers could utilize short essays or quick-fire questions within the broader classroom. This second option allows students to revise their opinions based on the views of others. In contrast, essay questions allow them to work out their thoughts and ideas in writing for an even more significant effect.
Summarising
Summarising stories is an excellent way to test reading comprehension, as it requires students to know what is and isn’t crucial to the plotline. Students must understand why the author wrote the text, the reason for the text, and the main points to focus on to create a clear summary that explains exactly what’s in the book without being too wordy. Setting a word limit or several lines can be an excellent way to limit students in what they can write about.
To extend this strategy, you can ask students to follow up on their summary by creating a blurb for their particular story choice. A blurb provides another way to look at reading comprehension, as it requires a clear and compelling summarization of a story without giving away the whole plot or ending. Invite students to compare the differences between the two, and they will be on their way to better understanding how comprehension can be used in various ways.
Finding the Main Idea
The main idea is a more advanced form of summarization, but as a more advanced skill, it’s an ideal follow-on to the strategy described above. Encourage students to read a passage of text as often as they need to, then write the story’s main idea down on paper. These can then be read out loud during class and discussed with fellow students in terms of the differences and similarities between each student’s interpretation of the text.
The main idea can be challenging for younger students, so starting small with short stories and building up to longer or more complicated text is ideal. Branching out from this strategy, students could create independent stories based on the same central idea they have defined to see if they can create something entirely different with the same essential purpose.
Story Mapping
Story mapping is an excellent way to help students visualize the meaning behind text by creating detailed maps and diagrams. This strategy provides students with a worksheet centered around story grammar. The purpose of this is to help students better identify all the elements that go into narrative text – to help them better comprehend the themes, characters, and setting the story is based within.
Story grammar generally includes the setting, the characters, the plot, and the theme of the story. Each section can be elaborated and expanded upon to better understand a story’s critical elements. The plot, for example, can be separated into the problem, the events, and the overall outcome. Read Naturally has a great blank story map to start with that’s perfect for the classroom.
Retelling
Retelling is a practical and straightforward strategy for helping students to comprehend the materials they read in class. Teachers should encourage students to retell a story they have learned in their own words instead of reading aloud to test whether they understand the material they have been provided with. This encourages children to go beyond simply reciting the words they know and pulling information from the material to craft their own stories.
This activity is ideal for quiet writing time, though it can also be suitable for more active classes where participation is preferred. Whichever method you use, retelling can be a powerful tool to encourage students to analyze and understand what they’re reading beyond what the text says. By drawing their conclusions and using their cognitive processes, students can summarize a story using their choice of words.
The KWL Process
KWL charts are a form of visual organizer that helps students to develop their understanding of a specific subject matter. Before reading the text, students are asked to write down what they Know. They are also invited to write what they Want to know when reading the text. Finally, once they have completed the text, students will be asked what they have learned, completing the three steps and providing answers to their questions.
While KWL isn’t applicable for all circumstances, it’s an excellent tool for use with reading comprehension. It encourages students to predict, question, and analyze text far beyond simply reading the words, which is the skill you should be trying to build as an educator. When implemented correctly with teacher support, this process can be highly effective.
Do you struggle with reading comprehension in your classroom? As with any class, there’s no one answer to teach reading comprehension skills. It’s all about finding that perfect balance that works for you and your students. For successful teachers, it’s more than worth the effort once your students start grasping – and even enjoying – the materials you provide.
