Methods for Teaching Reading Comprehension

NRP has identified two main focus points in their research, one is that text comprehension can be improved by instruction that helps students use specific comprehension strategies. The other factor that they point out is that children can be taught to use these strategies.

There are several comprehension strategies that can be used to help students improve their reading comprehension skills. These strategies include, but are not limited to: identify where the difficulty is, identify what the difficulty is, restate the difficult sentence or passage in their own words, look back through the text, and look forward in the text for information that might help them resolve the difficulty( context clues). Some of the strategies that can be used to improve comprehension are to monitor students compression, use graphic organizers, to answers students questions, to have students ask question, to recognize story structure, and summarizing.

The first strategy is to have students monitor their own comprehension . Some students are capable of tracking their own compression. Theses students will know when they understand the text and when they don't. These types of students who can track their own comprehension are able to fix problems that they might be having will reading, however, other students may not be aware of their comprehension skills. They may think that they are understanding the text, when in fact they are not.

The second strategy is to use a graphic organizer. Semantic organizer also work well. Graphic organizers help to show the relationships between compacts, characters and diagram. There is a wide verity of graphic organizers that can be used such as: maps, webs, Venn diagrams, KWL charts, webs and others. Semantic organizers can also be sued, this type of organizers look like the web of a spider. Semantic organizers are made of lines that connect to the main idea, even or word. Organizers can be used to help students focus on the concepts that are presented with in the text. Organizers can be used with factual next or fictional text. When using them with factual text it helps students to understand how one or more compacts tie into another. When you use organizers with factual text they can help students compare and contrast many components of the story. Graphic organizers help students to structure their reading while focusing on content.

A third strategy to help students with textual compression is answering questions. Have you ever heard that there's no such thing as a dumb question? Well theirs not. Asking question help to guide and monitor students comprehension . Questions helps students to learn from reading, because it gives them a reason to read. Questions also help to focus students attention on what they are suppose to learn, just as objectives do. Questioning encourages to read actively. This also helps students learn to monitor their own comprehension . Question helps students to review or refreshes on that they just read. This helps students relate what they have just read to prior knowledge. Questioning and answering instructions lets students to look back at the test they just read and find questions that couldn't answer before This can also help students to understand question and answer relationships, which is where the answer to a question can be found.

The fourth strategy that can be used is generating questions or having students ask questions. To help students activity process information from text teacher, need to teach them to ask themselves or the teachers questions. Sometimes teachers can lead a discussion dropping clues that cause students to ask and answer their own questions. The process of having students generate questions will help them to understand , whether or not they are comprehending the text. Generating question helps students to learn to ask themselves questions about the text as they are reading.

A fifth strategy that has been shown to be successful in the past is recognizing the structure of a story or the text. Students that can do this are able to develop a since of appreciation and understand and remember key point in the text. Students that can do this are then able to learn to identify categories of content, and how the content is organized into a plot. From here students can learn to use story mapping to recognize the structure of the story. Story maps help to show a visual of the sequence of events in the story.

A sixth strategy that can be used is to summarizes. Summarizing requires students to recall information from the story and put it into their own words. This also requires students to be able to pick out important information from the text and place it in the correct order in their summary.

Students can successfully be taught all of the above strategies to help improve their reading compression.. "Research shows that explicit teaching techniques are particularly effective for comprehension strategy instruction" (Armbruster, BB., 2003). It is helpful for teachers to instruct students during reading when to use the above strategies and witch strategy to use. The teacher should also tell students why and how to apply the strategy . Direct instruction should include a direct example, teacher modeling, guided practice, and application.

Cooperative learning can assist students with reading comprehension. This allows students will work together to help each other understand the text. This also lets students help each other learn and apply the comprehension strategies. It is the teachers job to teach students to work together. Teachers should model comprehension strategies and monitor the progress of students.

Effective instruction helps students with individual comprehension strategies. It also allows students to coordinate and adjust several strategies to help their own comprehension. Effective instruction teachers students how to be flexible and use strategies as needed to prompt their reading comprehension.

Multiple-strategy instruction can also be used and is called reciprocal teaching. During reciprocal teaching, teachers and students work together to help students learn the following comprehension strategies: asking questions about the text, summarizing parts of the text, clarifying words and sentences they don't understand, and predicting what may happen next in the text.

Comprehension strategies used began to be taught at a young age in the primary grades. This will help to build the fountain for teaching reading comprehension. "Instruction at all grade levels can benefit from showing students how reading is a process of making sense out of text, or construction in meaning" (Armbruster, BB., 2003). It's important that students learn that the purpose of reading is to gain information and therefore, good comprehension skills are required.

References:
Armbruster, BB., Lehr, F., and Osborn, J. (2003). Putting Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read.