Strategies for Reading Comprehension

              Brown (2004: 188-189) mentions the strategies for reading comprehension as follows:

1)   Identify the purpose in reading a text

2)   Apply spelling rules and conventions for bottom-up decoding

3)   Use lexiacal analysis (prefixes, roots, suffixes, etc) to determine meaning

4)   Guess at meaning (of words, idiom, etc) when you aren’t certain

5)   Skim the text for the gist and for the main idea

6)   Scan the text for spesific information (names, dates, key words)

7)   Use silent reading techniques for rapid processing

8)   Use marginal notes, outliners, charts, or semantic map for undertanding and retaining information

9)        Distinguish between literal and implied meanings

10)    Capitalize on discourse markers to process relationships.

              Zygouris and Coe (2009: 1-2) add that teacher can use these effective strategies to make students comprehend in reading, they are as follows:

1)   Activating prior knowledge

Teachers need to first find out what students know and balance out their background knowledge before presenting a new topic. When students are provided opportunities to link their own experiences and knowledge to new information, they are better able to comprehend text. However, they need direct instruction about how to make connections between the text and themselves, the world, and other texts. This will help them to make the connections and sustain their motivation to continue to read.

2)   Cooperative learning

Students can get benefit from reading and discussing what they read with peers. Cooperative learning strategies can help create a positive classroom environment, build student-to-student interactions, allow them to share strategies and ideas, and facilitate discussions that can support comprehension.

3)   Using graphic organizers

Comprehension is an abstract process. It has to become visible in order for students to learn how to construct meaning from text. Graphic organizers can help students organize information and identify how ideas are related to each other. These organizers can take the form of charts, graphs, pictures, or other graphics that help students organize information. Explicit instruction is very important for students to understand not only how to use graphic organizers, but also why and when to use them to construct meaning.

4)   Visualizing

This involves students making mental images of the text they read (e.g., processes, events). Creating images that relate to the setting, characters, or plot of a narrative text, or a concept or process in expository text, can help students better recall what they have read.

5)   Asking and generating questions

Questioning is effective for improving comprehension because it gives students a purpose for reading, motivates them to continue to read, focuses attention on what must be learned, helps to develop active thinking while reading, and monitors comprehension. Generating questions promotes student interaction with the text. It can help students to review content, make inferences, and relate what they are learning to known information. Teaching students to ask their own questions improves their processing of text and their comprehension.

6)   Recognizing text structure

Students who can recognize text structure (narrative and expository) will have a greater understanding of text. Students often are not familiar with the types of structures that are found in their textbooks, which communicate factual information and involve a variety of patterns such as description, sequence, comparison-contrast, cause-effect, and problem-solution. Teaching students how to use textual clues, such as headers, subtitles, bold letters, and charts and graphs, helps them to construct meaning from text. Helping them identify transitional words also can provide them with valuable clues to comprehension.

7)   Summarizing

Students often have difficulty deciding what is important in the text and putting it in their own words. Summarizing can be highly effective in helping students identify main ideas, generalize, remove redundancy, integrate ideas, and improve their memory of what they have read. Modeling summarization in class and providing students with opportunities to summarize are important teaching strategies.

8)   Monitoring comprehension

Good readers are aware of what they read and of what they do and do not understand. They use“fix-up” strategies (Tovani, 2000) to resolve problems with comprehension. Effective monitoring strategies include reading for a purpose, asking questions, rereading, looking back at a chart or other information in the text, predicting, solving word problems, or synthesizing known information with the text to check for understanding.