Should we Teach Reading Comprehension Strategies?
The short answer is yes!
“Research indicates that skilled reading involves conscious application of comprehension strategies” (CORE Teaching Reading Sourcebook, p 614).
But when? How much? And how?
Researcher Daniel T. Willingham summarizes the research takeaways on teaching reading comprehension strategies in his paper titled “The Usefulness of Brief Instruction in Reading Comprehension Strategies”.
He states:
Teaching children strategies is definitely a good idea.
The evidence is best for strategies that have been most thoroughly studied.
Strategies are learned quickly, and continued instruction and practice does not yield further benefits.
Strategy instruction is unlikely to help students before they are in the third or fourth grade.
He also states, “Teaching reading strategies is a low-cost way to give developing readers a boost, but it should be a small part of a teacher’s job”. He goes on to explain that acquiring background knowledge and rich vocabulary will yield stronger and more long term gains– but acknowledges that this is a heavy lift must be done in a very systematic way.
My take? Teach comprehension strategies in service of building knowledge and vocabulary. When you plan a lesson, ask yourself, what strategy do my students need in order to better understand this text?
When you plan a lesson, select a strategy (or focus point) that will help students better understand the text.
With that in mind, let’s talk about the strategies Willingham indicates as the most well studied.
Note: In the interest of avoiding redundancy, apply the below guidelines to ALL strategies:
The strategies will be most effective when taught in grades 3-5
Select a text that connects to your curricular content
Display the text and/or graphic organizer on your document finder; model annotating texts and/or completing graphic organizers on your document finder
Students should have a copy of the text and/or graphic organizer, plus a pencil and highlighter
Use an I do, we do, you do framework. Model with a read aloud, practice together with a text, provide an opportunity for students to work through a text independently or with a partner
Strategy 1: Monitoring comprehension
This first strategy is the foundation for all other strategies. When students know how to monitor their comprehension, they also know when to stop and reread, ask questions, build connections between sentences, etc. in order to clarify understanding.
To teach students how to monitor their comprehension, model the strategy during a read aloud. Ask questions and model your thinking; “I wonder why this character feels this way”, or “I can’t remember who ‘they’ is referring to in this sentence, let me reread the previous few sentences to figure it out”.
For practice, students can use sticky notes as they read a text independently to mark points of misunderstanding, jot down points of confusion, and ask questions they have about the text.
Strategy 2: Building Background Knowledge
Our background knowledge on a topic determines how well we understand that topic when we read. It provides a framework for organizing new information and helps us navigate a text. It also helps us make inferences and allows us to fill in gaps of information that are not explicitly shared by the author.
The easiest way to build background knowledge is by showing an image, map, or video that connects to your read aloud. By giving students visuals and explaining how they connect to the topic you will read about, you are giving them the information they need in order to understand the text.
You can also build knowledge by building text sets in your classroom. Rather than using a different text each day to teach a comprehension strategy, build text sets— a collection of fiction and non-fiction texts that all support student learning of an overarching topic or theme. For example, if you are teaching students about insects, place a tub of fiction and non-fiction texts all related to insects in your classroom library. Organizing your classroom library according to topic and theme is a good first step in creating a knowledge-focused learning environment.
Strategy 3: Making Predictions
When students make predictions, they connect their background knowledge to clues in the text to make an informed guess about what will happen next. Those expectations help to form a purpose for reading and motivate students to keep reading.
To teach students how to make predictions, consider the following steps:
Preview the title and text structure of a read aloud connected to your curricular content.
Model your thinking as you connect your background knowledge to what you are previewing and form a prediction.
Read the text aloud as students follow along, pausing during reading to model more predictions.
After reading, model how you evaluate the predictions you made.
During the next lesson, repeat the process with another text that connects to your overarching topic of study, and guide students through the above steps.
Students can orally share their predictions with a partner or in writing, depending on grade level.
Strategy 4: Recognizing Text Structure
Text structure refers to the way a text is organized and how that organization style conveys meaning. Students who struggle to comprehend a text often lack awareness of text structure (Williams, 2005). When students identify text structure, they are learning how the text is organized.
Narrative stories have a similar text structure for most texts:
Setting
Characters
Plot
Problem/solution
Theme
To teach narrative text structure, use a story map and try the following:
Model your own thinking during a read aloud.
Complete a story map together with students
Have students read their own passage/text and complete the story map independently.
Students can use their story map to summarize the story orally or in writing.
Informational texts follow a variety of structures:
Description
Compare/contrast
Cause/effect
Problem/Solution
Sequence of Events
To teach informational text structure, try the following steps:
Choose a graphic organizer that helps students map out the text structure reflected in the text.
Read a text aloud as students read along with their own copy.
Stop to fill in the graphic organizer as you read.
Have students highlight signal words, icons, phrases, images, etc. that help them better understand the text structure.
Have students read their own passage/text and complete the graphic organizer independently.
Students can use the graphic organizer to summarize the story orally or in writing.
Examples of Fiction (Story Map) and Non-Fiction Text Structure Graphic Organizers
For a more in-depth description on how to teach text structure, read this blog post.
Strategy 5: Asking Questions
Teaching students to ask questions is particularly helpful when students are reading informational texts. When students come to a new fact in the text, teach them to ask themselves, “why does this fact make sense?” Teaching students to ask questions that encourage them to think deeply about the text helps them explain information from the text, personalizing their interpretation and making it easier to remember important information.
To teach this strategy:
During a read aloud, model asking your own questions as you read a text together.
Give students opportunities to practice asking questions about a different text independently or with a partner.
Strategy 6: Answering Questions
To facilitate deep understanding of a text, we have to prepare higher level questions to ask students, carefully considering how we can link those questions to students’ prior knowledge. Fordham (2006) suggests that teachers ask “strategic questions” that prompt students to apply comprehension strategies to make meaning and foster metacognition (Fordham, 2006). We want to move beyond the literal, asking students to think deeply about what they are reading.
Below are examples of types of questions we might ask. Notice that the questions prompt students to find evidence in the text to support their answers, connect information to their own thinking as they read, and link their prior knowledge to the new knowledge coming in:
Where in the passage could you find the definition of the word “advocacy”?
What do you think about as you read about how pollution contributes to global warming?
How does your experience riding a bicycle impact what key information you pull from the text and include in your schema (framework of knowledge/understanding) about bicycles?
Strategy 7: Summarizing
Summarization can help students understand how the text is structured and how ideas are related (National Reading Panel, 2000).
To teach summarizing, use an activity called “paragraph shrinking”. Paragraph shrinking supports reading comprehension because it teaches students to pull the main idea from each paragraph from a text, helping them make sense of the text by summarizing the most important information.
Here are the steps to paragraph shrinking:
Model the below steps with a read aloud:
Highlight the most important who or what in a paragraph
Explain the most important information about the who or what
Combine the information from steps 1 and 2 to form a “main idea” statement.
Have students combine main idea statements from each paragraph to form a summary.
Then have students work in pairs with a graphic organizer that helps them pull the most important information from each paragraph.
Each student takes turns reading, pausing, and summarizing the main points of the paragraph in a text.
Ask students to share the following;
The most important who or what the paragraph is about
The most important thing about the who or what
The main idea
The first step in teaching paragraph shrinking is to help students pull the main idea from each paragraph in a text.
The second step in paragraph shrinking is having students combine their main idea statements into a summary.
Final Thoughts
In addition to the above strategies, using graphic organizers in general is a strategy supported by research. Providing a visual way for students to organize information makes sense. Remember that we are shifting our thinking— where once we planned our reading comprehension lessons based on strategies, i.e teaching main idea one week and summarizing the next, now we use comprehension strategies to help students deepen their knowledge and understand the text they are reading. Do you use any of these strategies? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
