Top 17 Reading Comprehension Strategies for Faster & Deeper Learning

When kids struggle with reading comprehension, they often lose motivation to read. This is no surprise, as reading is a foundational skill that supports learning across all subjects. So, when students aren’t grasping what they read, they are bound to do poorly in school. As such, it’s crucial to help them improve their comprehension skills to get them back on track. This blog will provide valuable insights on reading comprehension strategies to help you address any goals you may have in mind, like confidently applying effective how to teach essay writing strategies that enable faster understanding and deeper retention of any text, improving academic or personal learning outcomes.

EssayGrader’s grading software for teachers can help you achieve your objectives, such as to confidently applying effective reading comprehension strategies that enable faster understanding and deeper retention of any text, improving academic or personal learning outcomes. 

What is Reading Comprehension and Its Importance

Reading comprehension is understanding, interpreting, and analyzing written text. It involves not just decoding words but grasping their meaning within context. It is critical for success in:

• Education
• Career
• Daily life

Supporting skills like critical thinking, effective communication, and lifelong learning. For example, reading comprehension helps students understand a science textbook's dense, complex language. This ability is not only crucial for academic success. In the example above, the student’s future may depend on their performance in that class. 

Why Do Students Struggle With Reading Comprehension? 

“They don't understand what they are reading!” laments the teacher. “This book is too hard,” complains a student, “I'm confused!” Statements like these are commonly heard in grades 7-12, highlighting a reading comprehension problem that will connect to a student's academic success. 

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What are the 6 Essential Skills Needed in Reading Comprehension?

1. Decoding: The First Step to Reading Comprehension

Decoding is an essential step in the reading process. Children use this skill to sound out words they’ve heard before but haven’t seen written out. The ability to do that is the foundation for other reading skills. 

2. Fluency: Reading With Ease and Understanding

Fluency is the ability to read a text quickly and accurately. To read fluently, kids need to instantly recognize words, including words they can’t sound out. Fluency speeds up the rate at which they can read and understand text.

3. Vocabulary: Understanding the Words in a Text

To understand what you’re reading, you need to understand most of the words in the text. Having a strong vocabulary is a key component of reading comprehension. Students can learn vocabulary through instruction. 

4. Sentence Construction and Cohesion: Understanding How Sentences Work

Understanding how sentences are built is a writing skill. It might connect ideas within and between sentences, which is called cohesion. But these skills are important for reading comprehension as well. Knowing how ideas link up at the sentence level helps kids get meaning from passages and entire texts. 

5. Reasoning and Background Knowledge: Tapping Into What You Already Know

Most readers relate what they’ve read to what they know. Kids need to have background or prior knowledge about the world when they read. They also need to be able to “read between the lines” and pull out meaning even when it’s not spelled out. For example, A child is reading a story about a poor family in the 1930s. 

6. Working Memory and Attention: The Executive Function Skills That Help Kids Read

These two skills are part of a group of abilities known as executive function. They’re different but closely related. When kids read, attention allows them to take in information from the text. 

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17 Highly Effective Reading Comprehension Strategies

1. Develop Active Readers with the SQ3R Method

SQ3R is an effective reading comprehension strategy that empowers students to think critically about a text while reading. 

The SQ3R method includes the following five steps:

• Survey: Before reading, students survey the text. Have them notice the title, subtitles, illustrations, and graphics. Students can also read the first, last, and text summary (if provided).   
• Question: While surveying the text, students should formulate questions about the topic. Encourage students to write down questions as they arise. Students may also need help finding unknown vocabulary words. This is a good time to record them and determine their meaning.    
• Read: Students actively read the text. Ideally, they will find answers to the questions that arose during the survey portion of the strategy. Teach students to re-read unclear portions and determine the meaning of unknown words using context clues.   
• Recite: After reading the text, students think about the information in their own words. Summarizing the text will help students conceptualize the material.    
• Review: The last step in the SQ3R method requires students to review the text in more detail. Answering comprehension questions, completing a graphic organizer, or participating in a group discussion are all examples of how students can actively review the information presented in the text.  

2. Take Notes or Annotate Texts

Students should read with paper and pen in hand to jot down text they predict or understand, questions, a vocabulary list of highlighted words in the chapter, and any unfamiliar terms they need to define. Taking notes helps prepare students for class discussions.   

3. Use Chunking to Break Down Difficult Texts

Chunking is a reading strategy that breaks down challenging text into more manageable pieces. Dividing content into smaller parts helps students identify keywords, organize ideas, and synthesize information. A section of text may be broken down into paragraphs, or a paragraph may be broken down into sentences.

4. Enhance Metacognition with Close Reading

Close reading is a strategy that requires critical analysis of a short but complex text. A close reading lesson scaffolds student learning and focuses on text-dependent questions. Students read the text three times when participating in a close reading. The first reading is completed independently, focusing on key ideas and details. 

5. Guide Students Through A Text With KWL Charts

A KWL chart is a research-based reading strategy that activates students’ prior knowledge, sets a purpose for reading, and helps monitor comprehension. It works exceptionally well when starting a new text. Establish the topic of the text and create a three-column chart that will be completed collectively as a class.  

6. Encourage Cooperative Learning with Jigsaw

The jigsaw is a collaborative strategy that allows students to help each other improve their comprehension. In addition to helping students develop a deeper understanding of the text, the jigsaw strategy allows students to work cooperatively and strengthen their communication skills.  

7. Improve Comprehension with Mind Mapping

Research shows that creating visual representations of concepts and ideas can help students organize and remember what they learn. Mind mapping requires students to complete a diagram or graphic organizer to visualize the reading and connect ideas. 

Mind maps can be as highly structured as an in-depth graphic organizer or loosely based as doodle notes. The learning objective will help to determine the appropriate mind map for each lesson.  

8. Stimulate Structured Discussion with Reciprocal Teaching

Reciprocal teaching encourages students to think critically about a text using four reading comprehension strategies. Implementing reciprocal teaching in your classroom will provide students with valuable skills for independent reading. It is important to select and read the text together as a class before starting the reciprocal teaching process. 

9. Cultivate Meaningful Conversations with Think-Pair-Share

The Think-Pair-Share strategy gives students time and structure to formulate and share ideas. It promotes participation by encouraging thoughtful responses. If done correctly, this strategy can effectively build higher-order critical thinking skills. 

10. Develop Concise Summary Writing with GIST

GIST (Generating Interactions between Schemata and Text) is a strategy for establishing text comprehension. It encourages students to write concise, meaningful summaries, and it works well with all levels of readers. Teaching students summarizing techniques will help them learn to synthesize information effectively. 

11. Activating and Using Background Knowledge

This strategy requires readers to activate their background knowledge and use it to help them understand what they are reading. Background knowledge comprises a person’s experiences with the world (including what he or she has read) and concepts for how written text works, including word identification, print concepts, word meaning, and text organization. 

12. Predicting

This strategy involves readers' understanding of a text by making informed predictions. Good readers use prediction to connect their existing knowledge to new information in a text.9 Before reading, they may use what they know about an author to predict what a text will be about. The title of a text may trigger memories of texts with similar content, allowing them to predict the content of the new text.   

13. Summarizing

This strategy involves the ability of readers to pull together or synthesize information in a text to explain in their own words what the text is about. Summarizing is an important strategy because it can enable readers to recall text quickly. It also can make readers more aware of text organization, what is important in a text, and how ideas are related.  

14. Comprehension Monitoring

This involves readers' ability to know when they understand what they read and when they do not and to use appropriate strategies to improve their understanding when they are blocked. Comprehension monitoring is a form of metacognition. Good readers are aware of and monitor their thought processes as they read. In contrast, poor readers “just do it.”  

15. Retelling

Retelling is a strategy that involves telling the most important information. Have students do a five-finger retell. They hold their hand up and point to each finger as they explain the characters, setting, events one, two, and three, and the conclusion. Students point to their palms and share an opinion of the story or how the story made them feel. Using this prompt reminds students to include the main aspects of a story.  

16. Build Vocabulary

The more words a student knows, the more they can learn and the deeper they understand what they read. And the more times a student engages with a word, the more likely they are to remember and use it. 

Teach words using visuals and activities, like creating sentences with vocabulary. And teach students how to engage with words in the text. For example, practice reading “around” a word to define it when students read independently. They can use the same strategy when they’re stuck on a word.  

17. Foster Connections 

Between the reading material and real-world experiences to personalize comprehension.

Connecting reading material and real-world experiences helps students relate to their learning. Students who see how texts reflect their lives or societal issues are likelier to engage with the material and develop a deeper understanding.   

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