Reading Comprehension

Lately I’ve been realizing: being able to read is not the same as being able to understand what you read. Being able to understand what you read is not the same as being able to express that well, verbally or in writing.

It surprised me once when Ellie said her least favorite lesson at school that day was reading comprehension: that girl does nothing at home but sit around reading all day!

But I think reading, and reflecting on your reading—reading for meaning, not merely for fun—is an acquired skill. Probably one most of us do so automatically we’re not aware of how we do it. But research reveals that most children do not know how to check their understanding as they read. It has to be taught.

There are some basic tools that help with reading comprehension. One is acquiring good vocabulary. My favorite way of doing that with the kids is reading above their reading level and explaining words as we go. Another is teaching about genres and how they work: the elements of a story (plot, point of view, setting, theme, characters), poem (rhymed verse, free verse, literary devices like alliteration, metaphor, repetition), or non-fiction (headings, maps, index).

Then there are common reading comprehension strategies, to facilitate interaction with the text. Here is a summation of all the ones I found after some brief online research:

Connecting: what else does this remind you of? Is this like or unlike a past experience, other books?

Predicting: what do you think will happen next?

Visualizing: what picture do you have in your head as you read? Can you draw a picture after you finish reading, of how you felt, or a character or favorite scene?

Questioning: what questions do you have before, during, and after reading? What would you ask the author? What are you wondering about yourself, or about what you read?

Inferring: what do you think you can tell about something even though it wasn’t actually written? What clues can you get from the text, or from background you already know?

Fixing: if you don’t know, how do you figure out what it means? What can you tell from pictures or nearby parts?

Summarizing and retelling: how would you tell it to me in your own words? What is the main idea? What’s most important? How do you connect the main ideas? How do you put it all together into one main thing?

Critiquing: what did you like about what you read? What didn’t you like?

I try to insert questions like these as I read aloud to the kids—instead of just brainlessly flipping through each page, I pause and ask, what do you think will happen next? How do you think you’d be feeling if you were this person? Have you ever seen this happen before? What was your favorite part of the story? Etc.

My favorite moment with Ellie after we started doing this was when she said, “Mommy, I think one thing we can tell from this is that the girl is poor, even though it doesn’t say so.” We were reading my new favorite picture book, The Rag Coat by Lauren Mills, and it started a great conversation about what it means to be poor and rich, and what the main idea of the story had to do with her inference.

Here are two helpful links:

Scholastic handout on reading comprehension strategies

Reading comprehension for grades 1 and 2