How to Teach Reading Comprehension - Three Student Skills You Need to Learn

To teach reading comprehension you need to help your students master three skills: reading the text, manipulating the text and connecting ideas in the text.

1) Reading The Text - The following strategies will help your students do this.

Read slow enough to understand each sentence.
Create mental images of what is being read before moving on.
As you read the text, circle (or write out) any words that you don't know the meaning of. After reading the text, look the words up in a dictionary. With this new knowledge in mind, read the text again.
Discuss the meaning of difficult words or ideas with other students or the class as a whole.
Look up any locations in an atlas.

2) Manipulating The Text - The following strategies will help your students do this.

Identify the beginning, the middle and the end.
List the scene changes - each time that the story shifts location.
Identify the characters and the setting.
Ask who, what, where, when and why.
Identify the main idea of each paragraph or chapter.
Identify the introduction, complication and resolution.
Draw a story board.
Identify each characters relationship with the other characters.
Write questions about the text (for other students to answer).

3) Connecting Ideas - the following strategies will help your students do this.

Connect the story with your personal experience.
(How are the characters like people you know? How are the characters different from people you know? How is the setting like where you live? How is the setting different from where you live? Have you ever had a problem like the characters? Would you have done what the characters did?)

Connect the story with other stories you have read.
(How would you rate this story? What story is better than this one? Why? What story is worse than this one? Why? How is this story like -------------- (choose another story)? How is it different?)

Connect the story with the world of knowledge
Discuss key aspects of the story with other students or the whole class (For example, the golden slippers in Cinderella could lead to a discussion about slipper types, slipper cost, slipper construction and accepted slipper use). These discussions could lead to the researching and writing of a reports.