11 Simple Strategies To Improve Reading Comprehension Skills for Students

We encounter words everywhere – in cookbooks, social media, and instruction manuals. This is why mastering reading comprehension is vital for students. Reading comprehension isn’t automatic; it needs to be taught in classrooms, from kindergarten to high school, to make a lasting impact and improve reading comprehension.

Students often struggle with comprehension due to different learning styles, disinterest, lack of prior knowledge, difficulty focusing, or learning needs like dyslexia. Every student should have the opportunity to develop critical comprehension skills.

Reading is crucial for students and adults to acquire new information. According to a study in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, reading comprehension is a highly complex cognitive activity, posing challenges in teaching, measurement, and research.

Reading comprehension extends beyond the classroom, offering real-life applications for readers of all ages.

• It empowers readers to make informed daily decisions using available information.
• Readers gain the ability to think critically about online and news content.
• Reading comprehension strategies aid in deciphering meanings in recipes, directions, and step-by-step instructions.
• Improving reading skills helps students move beyond word recognition to understand and remember the text.
• Enhancing reading comprehension contributes to lifelong success, making students effective readers in various situations.

Here are eleven strategies for educators to help students love reading in their classrooms.

What Are the Two Core Components of Comprehension

Reading comprehension involves two key components: vocabulary knowledge and text comprehension. These skills work together, enabling students to extract maximum understanding from a text.

Vocabulary Knowledge

• Reading comprehension begins with strong vocabulary knowledge.
• Students with effective vocabulary strategies grasp word meanings and possess the background knowledge to understand texts.
• Utilizing context clues to decipher unfamiliar words is crucial to vocabulary knowledge.
• Improve reading comprehension can be hindered from the start without a solid grasp of vocabulary or the ability to learn new words.

Text Comprehension

• Text comprehension provides a holistic understanding of a text, enabling students to grasp its meaning.
• It allows students to interact with a text, understand its message and extracting essential information.
• Strong text comprehension skills enable students to answer questions about the author’s intent, summarize passages, and make connections between texts or prior knowledge.
• It facilitates a move beyond literal comprehension, engaging students in higher levels of thinking.

11 Ways To Improve Reading Comprehension Skills For Learners

Regardless of the grade level, implementing reading comprehension strategies is never too late to enhance understanding, retention, and connections. Recognize the diversity among students and tailor teaching methods accordingly. Effective reading comprehension strategies to consider include:

1. Build on existing knowledge

A major obstacle to reading comprehension is a lack of background knowledge. Please encourage students to record or explain what they already know about a topic, like the solar system, in an astronomy text. Use tools like quick questions or a KWL (Know, Want to Know, Learned) chart for insights.

Explore non-fiction and fiction books on the same topic to enrich understanding, e.g., a book about pigs and a picture book with pig characters. Reference facts from non-fiction books to distinguish between fact and fiction. Ensure all students grasp vital terms and ideas before reading, promoting a level starting point for inferences and connections.

2. Identify and summarize key ideas

• Summarizing a text post-reading enhances understanding by extracting the main points.
• Introduce summarization with leading questions and a structured approach, including length and key points.
• Adopt the “I do, we do, you do” format to model effective summarization techniques.
• Teach students to:
• Differentiate facts from opinions
• Identify key ideas amidst extra information
• Recognize important words and phrases
• Look up unfamiliar vocabulary

Conscious training in summarization helps students develop automatic summarization skills, improving overall reading comprehension.

3. Use online resources

• The internet expands reading beyond real-life experiences; it’s also online!
• Engage students with diverse interests using online resources for reading comprehension.
• Prodigy English is a new adventure promoting a love for reading through a game-based platform.
• Students answer curriculum-aligned questions to gain energy, explore a growing world, craft items, earn coins, and build their village.

Teachers can track progress and achievements through a free Prodigy English teacher account.

4. Use visual aids

Use visual aids and visualization techniques to help students create mental images while reading. Begin by reading aloud and prompting students to imagine the unfolding events. You must employ writing prompts such as identifying dominant colors, describing settings character traits, and imagining sounds in the story.

Enhance understanding by having students draw scenes, characters, or the entire story. Encourage additional engagement through activities like creating a family tree or fun notes to remember key points. Utilize anchor charts, word walls, or picture books to reinforce essential concepts for better retention.

Students who visualize the content are more likely to retain crucial information.

5. Develop vocabulary skills

• Vocabulary is crucial for text comprehension, ease, and fluency.
• Vocabulary teaching strategies empower students to understand new words independently.
• Effective methods include:
• Establishing a word wall in the classroom
• Associating new words with physical actions
• Developing graphic organizers linking known words to new ones

Read-aloud strategies help model the process of learning new words and improve reading comprehension , demonstrating the use of context clues and encouraging students to create vocabulary lists.

6. Implement thinking strategies

Foster critical engagement with a text by prompting students to ask questions like:

• Identifying bias in the material
• Understanding the author’s choice of genre or style
• Speculating about events before or after the story
• Analyzing character responses to situations

Encourage students to delve into deeper meanings and apply critical thinking skills to identify key points. Teach them to ask clarifying questions when faced with text ambiguity and create mind maps to draw connections between ideas and prior knowledge.

7. Create question and answer scenarios

• To improve reading comprehension, encourage a fresh perspective on the text by questioning students on various aspects.
• Challenge them to find answers:
• In different parts of the text
• Using their background knowledge
• Through their opinions and responses to the text

Ask questions to clarify meaning, enhance understanding of characters, make predictions, and discern the author’s intent.

Whether answered in groups or individually, these questions foster a habit of inquiry and critical thinking, prompting students to think beyond the page.

8. Encourage reciprocal teaching

Reciprocal teaching employs four strategies for reading comprehension and engages students in analyzing a text.

Utilize the “I do, we do, you do” method for the four building blocks of reciprocal teaching:

• Predicting: Asking questions about the story’s future events.
• Questioning: Exploring the who, what, when, where, how, and why of a story.
• Clarifying: Recognizing confusion, identifying the source, and working towards understanding.
• Summarizing: Condensing a reading to its crucial facts and ideas.

9. Use summarizing techniques

Though initially challenging, summarizing techniques teach students to identify and consolidate key ideas. Train students to automatically synthesize information while reading, benefiting learners of all levels.

When students encounter a text, prompt them to write a summary, refining it to include only essential information.

Guide their writing with clarifying questions, such as:

• What is the main idea of this passage?
• Which details support the main idea?
• What unnecessary information did the author include?

This process illustrates a story’s connections, emphasizes textual support, and underscores the importance of well-supported summaries.

10. Ask students to make predictions

Predictions involve using evidence from the beginning of a text to guess what will happen next, the text’s topic, or the details the author will use to support their argument.

Have students record predictions at the start of a reading and discuss the outcomes afterward. Explore what predictions were accurate and what factors influenced them. To improve reading comprehension, discuss whether the author followed or subverted expectations.

Model predictions with a think-aloud or provide blank statements to guide student thinking. This enhances reading comprehension, encourages critical engagement with the material, and teaches students to construct solid, text-based arguments.

11. Try making inferences

Inferences involve using known information to make educated guesses about unknown elements in a text. Unlike predictions, inferences extend beyond anticipating the following events. Students speculate on what happened before, the story’s genre, or events occurring after the story concludes.

Model inferences through read-aloud or guided questioning. Assign activities like writing a prequel or constructing character backgrounds based on textual evidence.

Inferences aid students draw connections between the text and their existing knowledge, fostering a deeper understanding of how the world works and stimulating creativity.

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