Teaching kids to identify text structure is a really good idea. However, focusing those efforts on how the content is structured will usually be more beneficial than on the common rhetorical structures.
This booklet summarizes what National Reading Panel researchers have discovered about how to teach children to read successfully. The guide lists the main research findings related to phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension and suggests best instructional practices in each area.
Use Bloom’s Taxonomy to teach students how to generate questions while reading. Research shows that generating questions at different levels of thinking can strengthen students’ memory, integration and identification of main ideas, and overall comprehension.
Questioning the author (QtA) is a strategy that engages students actively with a text. Rather than reading and taking information from a text, the QtA strategy encourages students to ask questions of the author and the text.
Comprehension is understanding what you read — the goal of reading! It is the thinking process readers use to understand what they read. Strong vocabulary, background knowledge, and an understanding of how language works are keys to comprehension.
This article discusses the power of reading aloud and goes a step further to discuss the power of thinking out loud while reading to children as a way to highlight the strategies used by thoughtful readers.
To help students comprehend expository text structures, teachers can acquaint them with the signal or cue words authors utilize in writing each of the structures and use the graphic organizers offered in this article
In this special Reading Rockets video series, experts answer real questions from families about reading and writing, and how to support their children’s literacy at home.
Teaching children with autism to comprehend text can be challenging. Here are some strategies educators can incorporate into daily lessons to meet the literacy needs of their students.
Helping kids connect with what they read. Hosted by Frank McCourt, this episode highlights effective strategies to help kids understand — and care about — what they read, the ultimate goal of learning how to read.
This article provides tutors with proven techniques for helping students acquire comprehension skills and strategies. In addition to building background knowledge about comprehension, it looks at six comprehension strategies and activities that support eachstrategy.
Reading with comprehension means understanding what’s been read. Here is a before-during-after approach that families can use to help children learn to read for understanding.
