Strategies to support comprehension

megan leddy

Students need differentiated comprehension strategies based off of their varying reading abilities. There are many different strategies to help those students better comprehend what they are reading and students should be given more comprehension strategies over time to ensure that they become strong readers as they encounter more complex text. Research has given educators ways to differentiate their strategies for better student comprehension.

One strategy to help with comprehension is metacognition. Metacognition can be defined as thinking about what you are thinking about. Metacognition can help students clarify the purpose for reading and helps them to monitor their understanding and adjust when needed to engage more deeply with text. After reading, students can also think about how they know what they know to help check their understanding of what was read. Teachers can teach metacognition by supporting students to ask questions, think about what they know and why, to make connections, and to double check their assumptions with what the author is saying. They can also think about pace, fluency, and whether or not they are fully understanding the words they are encountering. This helps them to adjust their reading and ask for help when needed.

Another strategy that could be used is comprehension monitoring. Comprehension monitoring helps the educator and the student to identify where the difficulty occurs and what the difficulty is by identifying what the student is comprehending throughout the reading process. While monitoring, the student is able to restate the difficult sentences or passages in their own words for better understanding. The educator and the student are also able to look back through the text and look forward in the text for any context clues that might help
elevate some of the content in the text. By understanding what a student comprehends, educators can clarify ideas and give students other strategies to adjust their comprehension.

Asking and answering questions is another strategy that could be used to support comprehension. Answering questions gives the student a purpose for reading. It helps the students to focus on what they are to be taking away from their reading. It also helps to encourage the students to think actively while they read and to monitor their own comprehension. They are also able to review and relate what they read to what they already know, building different kinds of connections to relate to the material in the text.

Summarizing is a skill and another strategy to teach students to build comprehension. Summarizing helps the student to identify or
generate the main idea or purpose of what they are reading by articulating what the text is about. It helps them to connect the main idea to the supporting details and understand how the text works together. Summarizing also helps to eliminate any extra information and it can help with recall. Teaching comprehension might look like teaching students to restate what the text was about in their own words, and then clarifying with questions to support students to narrow down their summary to just the most important information.

Another strategy is activating and using background knowledge. To be able to use background knowledge, the student needs to be aware of vocabulary and draw from both their own lives and what they have learned previously about a topic. Schema theory suggests that students will learn more when they build schema or connections between readings and their own ideas. By supporting students to think about what a text reminds them of, teachers can use background knowledge to build students’ reading comprehension. By applying these skills, the students are able to take what they know and apply it to what they are going to learn and make connections through it all.

Educators need to be explicit, intensive and persistent through their comprehension instruction. The teacher needs to model what is to be practiced, and then the students are guided by the teacher to help them figure out how to best use the strategy for themselves. The teacher can then provide feedback and engage in discussion to check for understanding of the used strategy. Through explicit instruction, the students are encouraged to think and plan before they read. They need to have a clear goal or purpose for reading, they need to continuously monitor themselves, and apply different strategies to help understanding when another strategy is not the best fit. To better help students to comprehend what they are reading, they need to be motivated to read. By applying these given comprehension strategies, the students will be motivated to read because they know they will better understand what they are reading.

References 

Classroom Strategy Library | Reading Rockets. (n.d.). Www.readingrockets.org. https://www.readingrockets.org/classroom/classroom-strategiesfocus=743&timing=All&purpose=All&size=All
Texas Education Agency. (2024). Key Comprehension Strategies to Teach | Reading Rockets. Www.readingrockets.org. https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/comprehension/articles/key-comprehension-strategies-teach
What Is Effective Comprehension Instruction? | Reading Rockets. (n.d.). Www.readingrockets.org. https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/comprehension/articles/what-effective-comprehension-instruction