Reading Comprehension

STRATEGIES

Developed byIvan Seneviratne

Understanding Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension is an essential part of the reading process. You need to learn a range of reading comprehension strategies to fully understand texts.

The Six Comprehension Strategies

1. Making Connections

2. Questioning

3. Visualizing

4. Inferring

5. Determining Importance

6. Synthesizing

Making Connections

There are three main types of connections we make while reading text.

Text-to-Self (T-S) refers to connections made between the text and the reader's personal experience.

Text-to-Text (T-T) refers to connections made between a text being read to a text that was previously read.

Text-to-World (T-W) refers to connections made between a text being read and something that occurs in the world.

Questioning

Questions help students clarify and deepen understanding of the text they are reading.

IN THE TEXT

Right There Think & Search

• Single sentence• Two sentences related

by pronoun

• Explanation• Compare/Contrast• Cause/Effect• List/Example

IN MY MIND

Author & You On your own

Visualizing

1. Mental pictures are the cinema unfolding in your mind that make reading three-dimensional.

2. Visualization helps readers engage with text in ways that make it personal and memorable.

3. Readers adapt their images as they continue to read.

Inferring

Usually referred to as "reading between the lines".This strategy usually involves:

1. Forming a best guess using evidence -- context clues, picture clues, etc.

2. Making predictions

3. Drawing conclusions

4. Finding meaning of unknown words

InferringWord Meanings From Context

Fortunately, the dizzy spell was transient. He was able to continue playing within seconds and had no trouble winning the match.

When you describe an event as “transient,” you are saying that __________.

a. it sounds like a trainb. it is quite harmfulc. it helps you wind. it doesn't last long

Determining Importance

People are bombarded daily with information.

1.Knowing the purpose for reading helps determine what's important.

2.Reader's need to distinguish between:

• Fiction and nonfiction • Important from unimportant

information

Synthesizing

• Thinking evolves through a process.•

• Reader's thinking changes as they gather more information.

• New information makes the reader re-evaluate their schema to form new schema.

Key Concept Synthesis

1. Examine for titles, subtitles, bold headings, and supportive graphics or visuals.

2. Determining which sentence in a paragraph is the topic sentence

3. Learning to identify statements that “forecast” main ideas or key concepts that will come at some point later on in the reading.

4. Recognizing that transitions may sometimes help to identify a main idea or a possible shift in the writer’s thinking.

5. Examining the summary statements in the paragraphs to verify and condense the main ideas or key concepts.

Acknowledgments

http://www.busyteacherscafe.com/units/comprehension_strategies.htm

This presentation is developed by Ivan Seneviratne © purely for personal use.ivanthexplorer@yahoo.co.uk