Reading Comprehension Teaching: Strategies and Activities
Several strategies can be used to improve students’ abilities to comprehend the text during reading. These are skimming, scanning, questioning, making predictions, vocabulary enrichment, and context analysis. Some of these strategies can be especially useful for students with various problems with reading comprehension. They can be used when reading a text in class, as students can apply them to grasp the context, understand new words, and perceive the text’s meaning.
- Skimming is a reading strategy that means quickly going through a text to get a general sense of its content. It helps readers identify the main ideas, key points, and overall structure without reading every word (Banditvilai, 2020).
- Scanning is similar to skimming in many ways, but it has a different purpose: to search for specific information or details in a text quickly. A reader should focus on key phrases and words and find them in the text, using them as milestones for text comprehension (Banditvilai, 2020).
- Questioning includes generating questions regarding the text’s content before, during, and after reading. It increases comprehension by helping readers engage with the text, activate prior knowledge, connect, and seek deeper understanding (Banditvilai, 2020).
- Making predictions involves using prior knowledge and textual cues to predict what might be written next in the text. This strategy encourages readers to make connections, draw inferences, and engage with the content actively (Banditvilai, 2020).
- Vocabulary enrichment strategies aim to improve readers’ understanding and use of new words encountered in a text. They include learning new words that are present there and deciphering their meaning (Elleman & Oslund, 2019).
- Context exploration analyzes contextual information in the text to grasp the meanings of words. Readers construct the meaning by using clues from the surrounding text, such as synonyms, antonyms, examples, or explanations (Elleman & Oslund, 2019).
Approach to Learning: Case Analysis
Two students from the class profile, Brandie and Fatma, can benefit from several of these six strategies. Let’s identify their problems and then elucidate which strategies may help with them, how, and why.
- Brandie has problems with verbal and nonverbal signals, and her reading skills are below the grade average. She often needs help understanding the meaning of a word, symbol, or voice tone. Thus, she needs help improving her ability to perceive the meanings of single words and then combine them.
- Fatma’s reading skills are below the class average, and she needs help rephrasing to be understood. She needs to grasp the context of the conversation or text, and therefore, she is often misunderstood and has trouble in life.
As one can see, students who have problems with understanding signals and rephrasing, along with low reading comprehension skills, can especially benefit from the strategies of context exploration, questioning, scanning, and making predictions. The text used for these purposes should be simultaneously simple in vocabulary while having several contexts, enabling readers to analyze them and make predictions.
“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” by Mark Twain, is a good example; it has straightforward language and a dynamic plot, enabling students to work with the context. Both Brandie and Fatma can read it and use these strategies to improve their abilities to understand the meaning. For Brandie, scanning and questioning would be especially useful to learn how to perceive words. Fatma would benefit from context analysis and predicting strategies, improving her rephrasing skills, and understanding what others want to say or write.
Recommendations
Therefore, several strategies can be chosen to help students improve their ability to perceive words, grasp the context, and understand the text in general. In the case of Brandie and Fatma, the main task was to ensure that they would improve their ability to perceive meaning. Brandie needs to learn how to perceive the meanings of words, while Fatma’s problems are in working with the context.
Their problems are similar in that both need to learn how to understand the sense of the words. While they can read and listen to the information, they need help to proceed with it, and appropriate reading comprehension strategies may help. Therefore, four practices were chosen: scanning, questioning, predicting, and context exploration, as each works primarily with the meaning.
For example, questioning, predicting, and context exploration can help students who have trouble perceiving the meaning of spoken or written phrases. Predictions help readers stay engaged, generate hypotheses, and develop expectations, fostering comprehension and curiosity. Text-based questions can focus on the main idea, supporting details, author’s purpose, or personal reflections, promoting critical thinking and active engagement with the text.
Context analysis strategy directly improves reading comprehension skills by enhancing the ability to perceive each word’s meaning in each case. It is beneficial for deepening comprehension and helps develop the ability to better understand written and spoken words. Lastly, scanning can help students understand the meaning of each word and improve their memory. In addition, it improves the ability to grasp contexts and define the text’s purpose.
References
Banditvilai, C. (2020). The effectiveness of reading strategies on reading comprehension. International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, 10(2), 46–50. Web.
Elleman, A. M., & Oslund, E. L. (2019). Reading comprehension research: Implications for practice and policy. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 6(1), 3–11. Web.