It turns out that students who have poor reading comprehension also often understand fewer spoken words and less of what they hear, and have worse spoken grammar. So, to address reading comprehension deficits effectively, educators may have to use an approach that teaches vocabulary, thinking skills, and comprehension first in spoken language and then in reading and written language.
Improving their overall language skills increases the likelihood that they will understand the words they encounter in written text. Since it is impossible to know every word one might encounter, students should be taught about the different types of context clues and how to use them to determine the meaning of unknown words. Teach thinking strategies: Once students have the vocabulary to be able to make it through a text, they often struggle with the complex thinking or sustained attention required to keep up with all of the important details and to access information that is implied but not directly stated.
Teachers can instruct students on cognitive strategies they can use. Many common text reading strategies—such as annotation, SQ3R , and the KWL chart —make use of these thinking strategies, including:.
Pulling deeper meaning out of text through the use of thinking strategies can be beneficial not just to reading comprehension but also to writing. Have students practice reciprocal teaching: Once taught, cognitive strategies can be consistently practiced and implemented through the use of reciprocal teaching , which encourages students to take a leadership role in their learning and begin to think about their thought process while listening or reading.
This sentence is basically a PSA for comma use. Because eye movement and cognitive patterns change with age, older adults take longer to scan and process text.
When reading Chinese, which is visually complex, older adults take almost twice as long as young adults. They might skip or guess more words in a sentence , for instance.
The ends of clauses and sentences are especially good places to slow for a beat. Psychologists refer to this as wrap-up, and more time spent on wrap-up tends to be associated with better recall of text. This particular metaphor is belabored and unwieldy, for instance, so it would have been useful for a reader to devote some extra time to wrap-up at the end of the previous sentence.
Crystallized intelligence helps people apply their reading skills. And print exposure plays an important role in word-reading processes , for children and adults alike. But sometimes elementary things get overlooked. So even though adults tend to have larger vocabularies and better word recognition than children, enlarging your vocab and generally practicing reading is likely to improve reading comprehension over time. All that highlighting you did in history class may have helped. Highlighting, underlining, color-coding, note-taking, and other forms of active learning can help to identify the most pertinent information and enhance reading comprehension.
But this is only up to a point. Excessive highlighting tends to defeat the purpose, and actually limits comprehension. In a potential blow to diehard digital readers, reading comprehension is still stronger in print than onscreen although more research is needed on the exact mechanisms for this.
When students preview text, they tap into what they already know that will help them to understand the text they are about to read. This provides a framework for any new information they read. When students make predictions about the text they are about to read, it sets up expectations based on their prior knowledge about similar topics. As they read, they may mentally revise their prediction as they gain more information.
Identifying the main idea and summarizing requires that students determine what is important and then put it in their own words. Asking and answering questions about text is another strategy that helps students focus on the meaning of text.
Teachers can help by modeling both the process of asking good questions and strategies for finding the answers in the text.
In order to make inferences about something that is not explicitly stated in the text, students must learn to draw on prior knowledge and recognize clues in the text itself. Studies have shown that students who visualize while reading have better recall than those who do not Pressley, Readers can take advantage of illustrations that are embedded in the text or create their own mental images or drawings when reading text without illustrations.
Narrative text tells a story, either a true story or a fictional story. There are a number of strategies that will help students understand narrative text. Teachers can have students diagram the story grammar of the text to raise their awareness of the elements the author uses to construct the story.
Story grammar includes:. Asking students to retell a story in their own words forces them to analyze the content to determine what is important. Teachers can encourage students to go beyond literally recounting the story to drawing their own conclusions about it. Teachers can ask readers to make a prediction about a story based on the title and any other clues that are available, such as illustrations.
Teachers can later ask students to find text that supports or contradicts their predictions. Asking students different types of questions requires that they find the answers in different ways, for example, by finding literal answers in the text itself or by drawing on prior knowledge and then inferring answers based on clues in the text. Expository text is typically structured with visual cues such as headings and subheadings that provide clear cues as to the structure of the information.
The first sentence in a paragraph is also typically a topic sentence that clearly states what the paragraph is about. Teaching these structures can help students recognize relationships between ideas and the overall intent of the text.
A summary briefly captures the main idea of the text and the key details that support the main idea. Students must understand the text in order to write a good summary that is more than a repetition of the text itself. After all of the students have read the text, the teacher leads a discussion of the questions and answers.
Printable K-W-L chart blank. Graphic organizers provide visual representations of the concepts in expository text. Representing ideas and relationships graphically can help students understand and remember them.
Examples of graphic organizers are:.
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