10 Strategies to Increase Reading Comprehension

Generate Questions
A good strategy to teach all readers is that instead of just rushing through a passage or
chapter, is to pause and generate questions. These can either be questions about what has
just happened or what they think might happen in the future. Doing this can help them
focus on the main ideas and increase the student's engagement with the material.
After reading, students can go back and write questions that could be included in a quiz or
test on the material. This will require them to look at the information in a different
manner. By asking questions in this way, students can help the teacher correct
misconceptions. This method also provides immediate feedback.

Read Aloud and Monitor

While some might think of a teacher reading aloud in a secondary classroom as an
elementary practice, there is evidence that reading aloud also benefits middle and high
school students as well. Most importantly, by reading aloud teachers can model good
reading behavior.
Reading aloud to students should also include stops to check for understanding. Teachers
can demonstrate their own think-aloud or interactive elements and focus intentionally on
the meaning “within the text,” “about the text,” and “beyond the text” (Fountas & Pinnell,
2006) These interactive elements can push students for deeper thought around a big idea.
Discussions after reading aloud can support conversations in class that help students make
critical connections.

Promote Cooperative Talk

Having students stop periodically to turn and talk in order to discuss what has just been
read can reveal any issues with understanding. Listening to students can inform instruction
and help a teacher to can reinforce what is being taught.
This is a useful strategy that can be used after a read-aloud (above) when all students
have a shared experience in listening to a text.
This kind of cooperative learning, where students learn reading strategies reciprocally, is
one of the most powerful instructional tools.

Attention to Text Structure

An excellent strategy that soon becomes second nature is to have struggling students
read through all the headings and subheadings in any chapter that they have been
assigned. They can also look at the pictures and any graphs or charts. This information can
help them gain an overview of what they will be learning as they read the chapter.
The same attention to text structure can be applied in reading literary works that use a
story structure. Students can use the elements in a story's structure (setting, character,
plot, etc) as a means of helping them recall story content.

Take Notes or Annotate Texts

Students should read with paper and pen in hand. They can then take notes of things they
predict or understand. They can write down questions. They can create a vocabulary list of
all the highlighted words in the chapter along with any unfamiliar terms that they need to
define. Taking notes is also helpful in preparing students for later discussions in class.
Annotations in a text, writing in the margins or highlighting, is another powerful way to
record understanding. This strategy is ideal for handouts.
Using sticky notes can allow students to record information from a text without damaging
the text. Sticky notes can also be removed and organized later for responses to a text.

Use Graphic Organizers

Some students find that graphic organizers like webs and concept maps can greatly
enhance reading comprehension. These allow students to identify areas of focus and main
ideas in a reading. By filling in this information, students can deepen their understanding
of the author's meaning.
By the time students are in grades 7-12, teachers should allow students to decide which
graphic organizer would be most helpful to them in understanding a text. Giving students
the opportunity to generate representations of the material is part of the reading
comprehension process.

Summarizing
As they read, students should be encouraged to stop periodically stop their reading and
summarize what they have just read. In creating a summary, students have to integrate
the most important ideas and generalize from the text information. They need to distill
the important ideas from the unimportant or irrelevant elements.
This practice of integrating and generalizing in the creation of summaries make long
passages more understandable.

Monitor Understanding
Some students prefer to annotate, while others are more comfortable summarizing, but
all students must learn how to be aware of how they read. They need to know how fluently
and accurate they are reading a text, but they also need to know how they can determine
their own understanding of the materials.
They should decide which strategies are most helpful in making meaning, and practice
those strategies, adjusting the strategies when necessary.