Facilitating Student Reading Comprehension

What Are Strate­gies That Can Improve Read­ing Comprehension?

Read­ing com­pre­hen­sion is a some­what tricky skill to eval­u­ate, but what edu­ca­tors agree on is that it boils down to get­ting stu­dents to think sharply while they are reading. Indeed, teach­ers are cov­er­ing oth­er ver­bal skills, such as vocab­u­lary acqui­si­tion and writ­ing. But read­ing com­pre­hen­sion pre­pares stu­dents for var­i­ous chal­lenges they will face in col­lege and beyond. Read­ing com­pre­hen­sion is a skill set that is not lim­it­ed to Eng­lish cours­es. In Social Stud­ies, stu­dents use it to ana­lyze facts and detect pat­terns in infor­ma­tion about his­to­ry. In the sci­ences, read­ing com­pre­hen­sion also allows stu­dents to under­stand the rel­e­vance of sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries to con­tem­po­rary mat­ters. In all dis­ci­plines, what is impor­tant is mak­ing sure that stu­dents are read­ing intel­li­gent­ly and critically. When stu­dents mas­ter read­ing com­pre­hen­sion, they are more ready for the mate­ri­als they will be exposed to in college. A stu­dent with excel­lent read­ing skills, for exam­ple, can man­age read­ing mate­ri­als in a Reli­gion or Polit­i­cal Sci­ence course bet­ter than a stu­dent who has already stud­ied these sub­jects but does not have suf­fi­cient read­ing com­pre­hen­sion skills. Includ­ing read­ing com­pre­hen­sion in all facets of edu­ca­tion is vital to pre­pare stu­dents for the sub­jects at hand. They need it to under­stand his­to­ry, com­pre­hend com­plex log­ic, and mas­ter sci­en­tif­ic concepts.

Reading Comprehension: A primer

Read­ing com­pre­hen­sion is a skill relat­ed to the capac­i­ty to under­stand and process read­ing mate­r­i­al. A stu­dent with good read­ing com­pre­hen­sion will be able to have a good over­all grasp of a pas­sage’s con­text and significance. Not just lim­it­ed to the lev­el of words and para­graphs, read­ing com­pre­hen­sion relates to the gen­er­al mes­sage of a text and its rhetor­i­cal devices. Is it per­sua­sive? What is the pur­pose of the text? Does it attempt to con­vince the read­er of something?

Improving Reading Comprehension

In the age of smart­phones, many par­ents report that their chil­dren don’t like to read. That means that they are not as liable to put in the effort to under­stand what a text means. Sub­se­quent­ly, this leads to a drop in read­ing com­pre­hen­sion and a vicious cycle of not lik­ing read­ing. If stu­dents don’t under­stand what they are read­ing, they are less like­ly to take up read­ing on their own. What can edu­ca­tors do to pro­mote read­ing com­pre­hen­sion and read­ing in gen­er­al? One of the great­est mis­takes is forc­ing mate­ri­als that are unin­ter­est­ing to stu­dents. That is one of the best ways to dis­suade young peo­ple from read­ing at all. Instruc­tors may assign a chap­ter or two about an eso­teric top­ic to stu­dents. Why would they ded­i­cate their time to read­ing about some­thing that is poten­tial­ly unin­ter­est­ing to them? Why do they take pains to write notes or high­light key pas­sages when they don’t care about the material? It’s impor­tant to think about the stu­dents’ points of view and the oth­er dis­trac­tions that they have com­pet­ing for their attention. Before they read, stu­dents could use some guide­lines to get them moti­vat­ed and engaged with the mate­r­i­al. When con­front­ed with a big block of text, they might feel daunt­ed and not know what to do. Work on some ideas about how to cre­ate a more active read­ing mod­el for your stu­dents to get them inter­est­ed in what they are read­ing – mean­ing that they are ask­ing ques­tions to guide the read­ing process and answer­ing them along the way.

- Reading Comprehension Questions

One of the best ways to ori­ent stu­dents’ read­ing is to cre­ate read­ing com­pre­hen­sion ques­tions for stu­dents. So they know what to look out for and facil­i­tate their over­all under­stand­ing of the text. Some­times, the ques­tions pro­vide answers by sug­gest­ing the pri­ma­ry themes and major ideas of a passage/ Which helps stu­dents while reading. Once the stu­dents have com­plet­ed the text, they can cre­ate ques­tions that the instruc­tor can include in a quiz or ques­tion-and-answer session. This way, the stu­dent feels like an active par­tic­i­pant in the con­ver­sa­tion about the text rather than a pas­sive recip­i­ent who needs to respond to for­mu­la­ic questions.

- Reading Out Loud & Engaging With the Text

Read­ing out loud may seem ele­men­tary, but it gets stu­dents involved and some­times even allows them to show­case their dra­mat­ic talents. When teach­ers read out loud, it can keep stu­dents inter­est­ed. And when stu­dents read out loud, they become active par­tic­i­pants in the per­for­mance of the text and more read­i­ly invite commentary. As stu­dents read out loud, there are ample oppor­tu­ni­ties to stop and per­form com­pre­hen­sion checks. In these instances, instruc­tors can ask for feed­back from stu­dents and demon­strate mul­ti­ple ways to approach the text, from the lev­el of the indi­vid­ual words to more con­tex­tu­al commentaries. Ulti­mate­ly, dis­cus­sions about the text gen­er­at­ed in this way can lead to larg­er-scale con­ver­sa­tions about the main ideas in the text. That often proves vital to stu­dents’ abil­i­ties to make con­nec­tions between the mate­r­i­al and oth­er texts from the course as well as oth­er courses.

- Supporting Constructive Discussion

The class dis­cus­sion pro­vides the instruc­tor with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to check read­ing com­pre­hen­sion. As well as facil­i­tate a syn­the­sis of ideas that can help to iden­ti­fy the rel­e­vance of the pas­sage or pas­sages under discussion. At the same time, such con­ver­sa­tions allow the instruc­tor to high­light the impor­tance of key ideas and reit­er­ate pri­ma­ry themes.

- Close Reading Strategies

Guid­ing stu­dents through close-read­ing process­es helps them to see the rel­e­vance of word choice and structure. In the process, they can also eval­u­ate any sup­port­ing mate­ri­als like illus­tra­tions or charts. All of these fea­tures assist them in their over­all com­pre­hen­sion of the themes for a chap­ter or sec­tion at hand. When applied to a lit­er­ary text, atten­tion to a lit­er­ary struc­ture can help stu­dents appre­ci­ate how a text is orga­nized and affects read­er under­stand­ing. At the same time, a study of the struc­ture serves to help stu­dents com­pre­hend and retain the con­tent of a text.

- Written Forms of Responding to Texts

Stu­dents should always have their pens ready to take notes and write down the asso­ci­a­tions that come to mind dur­ing read­ing or discussion. They should also write down unfa­mil­iar words and look them up to gen­er­ate a vocab­u­lary list. When stu­dents take notes, they are also bet­ter pre­pared for sub­se­quent dis­cus­sions in class. Stu­dents may also anno­tate a text by writ­ing in the mar­gins or high­light­ing. That is espe­cial­ly help­ful with hand­outs, but it is also pos­si­ble with books; if they don’t want to write in a book, they can use sticky notes. They can then orga­nize sticky notes lat­er to group their ideas when think­ing about their respons­es to a passage.

- Working From Context

To under­stand a text over­all, stu­dents need to grasp the gen­er­al con­text well. If they don’t under­stand a word, for exam­ple, they may be able to deduce the mean­ing based on oth­er words that come before and after. For deter­min­ing vocab­u­lary, stu­dents may also use a word’s roots and affixes/suffixes to deter­mine its mean­ing. Look at how the word is used in con­trast with oth­er words in the sen­tence or pas­sage; deduce its mean­ing based on the rest of the sen­tence; look up a def­i­n­i­tion of a word; ascer­tain how the word func­tions gram­mat­i­cal­ly; or search for an illus­tra­tion of the word to arrive at a more pre­cise definition.

- Organizing Information Visually

Stu­dents may find that orga­niz­ing infor­ma­tion visu­al­ly, such as through con­cept maps, sig­nif­i­cant­ly enhance their under­stand­ing of read­ing material. That allows stu­dents to visu­al­ize the con­tent of the read­ing and under­stand it in terms of main areas and concepts. When stu­dents are at the high school lev­el, instruc­tors should be able to deter­mine which ways stu­dents can orga­nize infor­ma­tion visu­al­ly to facil­i­tate their read­ing com­pre­hen­sion best.

- Providing Summaries

It is good prac­tice for stu­dents to gen­er­ate sum­maries of what they have read as they go along. When they write these sum­maries, they include the mate­r­i­al they have already cov­ered and iden­ti­fy key points from the passages. Instead of just regen­er­at­ing con­tent, stu­dents need to deter­mine the key points to iden­ti­fy the major themes and mes­sages of a passage. As they cre­ate sum­maries, stu­dents dif­fer­en­ti­ate main from minor con­tent and can come up with the major points of a passage.

Final Thought!

Stu­dents’ pref­er­ences will dif­fer: some will opt for anno­tat­ing texts, while oth­ers will choose to summarize. In either case, stu­dents need to under­stand what their approach­es to texts are. This way, it is pos­si­ble for them to not only improve their read­ing com­pre­hen­sion. But mas­tery over how to do it and deter­mine which meth­ods work best for them. These strate­gies will vary from indi­vid­ual to indi­vid­ual, and each stu­dent should be capa­ble of ascer­tain­ing their best strat­e­gy for iden­ti­fy­ing and sum­ma­riz­ing a tex­t’s key points.