Reading Comprehension Strategies

Reading comprehension strategies – Reading comprehension is the ability to read a text and understand its meaning. The objective of the reader is to comprehend the author’s message.

Research suggests that that there are several ways to improve a student’s comprehension level:

1. Teach word knowledge – encourage students to build their knowledge of the world in order to make connections with prior knowledge

2. Teach vocabulary – the more words a student knows, the easier it is to derive meaning from a text

3. Teach decoding skills – a student must first know how to read a word, by putting the letters and sounds together before deriving meaning from the words

4. Active Comprehension strategies – teach students a variety of strategies including:

· prediction

· inference

· questioning

· visualizing

· summarizing

· sequencing

· main ideas

5. Monitoring – Encourage students to monitor their own understanding as they read; do they know when they are not able to follow a text?