Teach Comprehension Strategies
Teach students reading comprehension strategies using carefully selected texts.
Many young readers learn to decode text but do not construct meaning with text. It’s important to teach beginning readers the strategies and mental actions that good readers use to construct meaning from text. Strategies such as activating prior knowledge or predicting, questioning, visualizing, monitoring, drawing inferences, and summarizing can be taught one by one or in combination. These strategies should be taught through explicit instruction and modeling, opportunities for guided and independent practice, and a gradual release of responsibility to apply the practice from teacher to students. When selecting texts for teaching reading comprehension strategies, teachers should draw from different genres, paying close attention to text quality and difficulty level. Selected texts should support the specific aim of the instruction.
Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies and Selecting Appropriate Text
This multimedia overview introduces central ideas in comprehension strategy instruction, offers some examples of specific instructional approaches, and describes the importance of text selection when teaching comprehension strategies. (5:28 min)