5 Strategies to Teach Comprehension

Comprehension is the crux of reading. Unless a reader understands the text given in the book, reading does not make sense. Hence teaching comprehension is very important to the students at the same time it is not a very easy task.

The child who has well developed comprehension skills will be much ahead in academics. The reason is that he will be abl

e to apply knowledge to get the desired result.

Below mentioned are some of the comprehension strategies which can be useful to develop good readers who can understand well.

a.     Reading Fluency: Develop reading fluency among the children first. When they are able to read age appropriate material fluently, only then can they concentrate on understanding the meaning of the text. But educators and parents need to understand that reading fluency is not the same as reading comprehension. Comprehension focuses on understanding the text, inferring meaning and retaining the gained knowledge.

b.     Imagination: Ask the students to close the books. The teacher reads the text and asks the students to draw pictures of what they just heard. This helps them to expand their imagination and most importantly they think.

c.      Main idea or central theme: Ask the children to point out the central theme of the paragraphs or the text.

d.     Make maps or diagrams: The students can be asked to make maps or flow charts of the movement of the characters of the story.

e.      Difficult words: Teach the students to underline the difficult words if they do not understand their meaning. After completing the text and understanding the passage ask them to relate the meaning of the word by reading the text. Then ask them to cross check their meanings with the dictionary. With this exercise they get into the habit of finding the meaning by inferring an idea by relating words.