How Do We Engage Students Who Struggle with Reading Comprehension?
joseph lamb
It is important for us as educators to make sure we are supporting our students who struggle with comprehension. In order to do this, we have to know what to look for, as comprehension difficulties are very easy to go unnoticed, compared to students with decoding difficulties. Students with comprehension difficulties may still appear to have good fluency and language skills, which is why it can easily go unnoticed. To support these students, we need to use evidence-based practices, such as assessment and data-driven teaching, to assess students’ needs.
I used research-based suggestions from Reading Rockets and Edutopia to find effective strategies for teachers to increase comprehension and motivation levels in their classrooms.
Personalized Learning:
It is important for teachers to personalize learning for individual students’ needs. Comprehension comes in different ways for different students, so it is important to use various strategies to personalize learning and address reading challenges. One important way to identify individual students’ needs is through assessments, which teachers should use to modify interventions based on student results. Other strategies that teachers can use during
reading instruction to help improve comprehension include thinkalouds, reader’s theater, word maps, text sets, visualizing content, using timelines, and more. By personalizing learning experiences, teachers can gauge instruction based on students’ readiness levels, which promotes progress and achievement.
Motivation for Comprehension:
The first step to comprehension, or any other reading skill, is motivation and engaging your students. Motivation also leads to success in classroom activities. There are four different types of motivation which include
curiosity - The desire to learn about a topic
aesthetics - The enjoyment of experiencing a literary text
challenge - Learning complex ideas from text
social - Students read in groups during instruction and share texts in many social situations.
As a teacher, it is important to choose the right text for your students. Texts should spark curiosity and engagement, as this can pique student’s level of curiosity about words and concept and their engagement with the text and the topic. This leads them to be confident in themselves as readers, writers, and learners.
Ways to Support Students Who Struggle with Comprehension:
One way to support students who struggle with comprehension is language. Research shows that reading comprehension difficulties may come from a need to build spoken language. Students with poor reading comprehension often understand fewer spoken words and have worse spoken grammar (Parrish, 2020, np). To address this, teachers should teach vocabulary, thinking skills, and comprehension prior to reading. Another way to support students who struggle with comprehension is to have students practice reciprocal teaching. This is when you have a questioner, which is someone
who poses questions about parts of the lesson, a summarizer, who sums up important details from the lesson, a clarifier, who tries to address the questioner’s questions, and a predictor, who predicts what will happen next based on what was presented in the lesson.
To support students who struggle with comprehension, teachers should used evidence-based practices such as assessments to address the issue. Teachers should also personalize learning experiences to meet individual students’ needs, which could include using think-alouds, reader’s theater, word maps, and more. Success in comprehension starts with motivation. There are also other strategies, such as targeting comprehension of language and having students practice reciprocal teaching, that can help improve students’ comprehension skills.