Some children can master decoding and still be poor comprehenders. Learn what interventions have been found to help these children read narrative and expository texts more strategically.
Students who read with understanding at an early age gain access to a broader range of texts, knowledge, and educational opportunities, making early reading comprehension instruction particularly critical. This guide recommends five specific steps that teachers, reading coaches, and principals can take to successfully improve reading comprehension for young readers.
ELL students learn new words everyday, and it’s essential that they have a deep understanding of what those words mean. Without comprehension, new words are useless. The key to helping ELL students succeed is to give them explicit instruction in the academic language of the content they are learning in class. This article offers some strategies and resources for getting started!
Getting information from a nonfiction text can be especially challenging for ELLs, who may not have had much experience working independently with expository texts. This article offers ways that teachers can help ELLs work effectively with nonfiction texts and includes strategies for introducing components, structure, and purpose of expository texts.
Inferential thinking is a key comprehension skill that develops over time through explicit teaching and lots of practice. Find strategies for teaching inferencing, watch a demonstration, and observe a classroom lesson in action.
An Inquiry Chart (I-Chart) is a tool that enables students to generate meaningful questions about a topic and organize their ideas. Students integrate prior knowledge or thoughts about the topic with additional information found in several sources.
Jigsaw is a cooperative learning strategy that asks groups of students to become “experts” on different aspects of a topic and then share what they learn with their classmates.
How can classroom reading instruction help poor readers — indeed, all students — become more like good readers? Research suggests that the answer may lie in providing students with instruction that both teaches them the comprehension strategies that work so well for good readers and helps them to develop the necessary metacognitive awareness of how and when to use these strategies.
Learn about strategies and ed-tech tools that can help students to reflect on what they did over the summer and then design introductory projects that connect their experiences to the school-year curriculum.
The Knowledge Matters Campaign is an advocacy initiative focused on the critical role of knowledge-building in reading comprehension and critical thinking, with the belief that introducing all young children to rich disciplinary content and vocabulary levels the playing field for learning. The campaign highlights English language arts (ELA) curricula that are carefully designed to build background knowledge in science, history, literature, and the arts, alongside sound foundational skills instruction.
Learning happens when we connect new information to what we already know. When children have limited knowledge about the world, they have a smaller capacity to learn more about it. Here are four ways teachers can build content knowledge that will expand the opportunity for students to forge new connections — and make them better independent readers and learners.
