Reading Tip: You can teach specific comprehension strategies!
Recently I’ve had some conversations with people about teaching reading comprehension. It can be argued that this is the most important component of reading. After all, if we don’t understand what we’re reading, what’s the point? However, it is a higher level reading skill and builds upon other skills that are more concrete in nature. The chart below shows how these skills build upon each other.
We aim for comprehension so that those higher level skills can follow. The lower level skills (phonemic awareness, decoding, vocabulary, and fluency) should have been mastered in the early grades. With our ELLs, however, vocabulary and fluency are still being developed. This can impede comprehension, so the first line of defense in helping students comprehend is to make sure they know the words (vocabulary) and are reading appropriate material on their reading level (fluency). We can also help fluency by allowing students to partner read or doing a teacher read aloud of more complex material.
In addition to this, we can teach specific comprehension strategies. Here are some you might want to try.
Graphic Organizers are a great way to keep students paying attention to the text while requiring them to note important information.
Setting a purpose for reading gives students a cognitive hook to hang their thoughts on. You can specifically state a purpose (e.g., “When you read this, you should look for the causes of the Civil War.”) or you can ask questions to give students purpose. Questions can range from simple recall to evaluation.
Tell students to monitor their own comprehension. We know good readers do certain things, such as identifying parts of a passage they don’t understand, restating points from the passage in their own words, and looking forward and back in the text to help them understand a confusing part. Tell students to monitor their own comprehension and model for them how to do that. For example, point out a confusing part in your text and ‘think aloud’ as you identify the confusing part, look through the passage to help you clear things up, and restate the passage in your own words. Students can also go through this process with a partner.
What are some ways you help students with reading comprehension?