Recommendations for Maintaining and Building Reading Comprehension Skills

To support clients in the development and maintenance of reading comprehension skills you may want to:

General Strategies:

• Encourage the client to discuss orally read stories frequently.

• Encourage the client to read aloud.

• Encourage the client to engage in oral reading lessons. There are books available for purchase that provide information on oral reading lessons.
  • Developing Reading Comprehension Clarke, Truelove, & Hulme (2010).

• Encourage the client and their reading partner to review new words that are important to understanding the content of the text.

• Encourage your client to implement an “active” reading strategy or plan.
  • The SQR3 is a five stage active reading technique that helps get the maximum benefit from reading/study time.
  • The technique is useful for efficiently absorbing written information and creating a good mental framework for the subject area. 
  • It also helps students set specific study goals when reading or previewing textbooks or other study documents. The acronym SQ3R represents five sequential steps:

SQR3

■ Survey: Scan the contents, introduction, section introductions, and section summaries to help develop an overview of the written material.

■ Question: Make note of any questions that come to mind the following the survey of the document. These questions may be considered the beginning of the reading goals.  In other words, understanding the answers to these questions will help focus the reading time.

■ Read: Read through useful sections in detail, and take notes or begin to develop concept maps.

■ Recall: After each section of the document has been read, isolate the important facts or the essential processes behind the content and run through it in your mind several times. Then, make attempts to link it with other information contained in the chapter.

■ Review: once the step of recall has been completed, review the material by rereading the important sections in the document or text, expanding maps, or by discussing the material with instructors and peers.

• Encourage your client to master the skills of underlining, circling, and writing comments to help reinforce recall. This will be particularly important in the higher grades.

• Teach your client to distinguish when text does or does not make sense to her. You may provide practice in this skill by rewriting a passage and adding sentences within the text that contribute nothing to its meaning. Then have them read the material and attempt to locate those sentences.

• Allow your client adequate time for reading activities at school. They will need more time than many of their peers. This will include both assignments and exams.

• Emphasize reading for detail. Sometimes it helps to give specific questions in advance so that students can read to locate the required information.  Proofreading exercises and other methods that focus on fine detail are most desirable.

• To ensure that what is being read is understood, instruct a teacher or parent to check-in with the client after each page or paragraph and determine whether the main idea(s) can be identified, whether the information connects to previous pages, and whether it makes sense.  Encourage the client to try to guess what may happen in the next paragraph.

• Encourage your client to slow down while reading and to repeat a sentence to themselves in their mind before proceeding to the next one. This is likely to improve their comprehension. 
  • To increase their awareness of the reading process, have them point out or underline unfamiliar words and phrases. 
    • In addition, the text can be broken down into smaller sections. 
    • Comprehension of preceding parts should be ensured before moving on to the subsequent ones (teacher’s questions would be helpful in this regard).

• Instruct the client to take notes after reading or tell someone what they are reading about.

• When reading, instruct your client to try to imagine the content of what they are reading, as if they are watching a movie or a television show. This type of visualization should help to improve comprehension.

• Give your client questions to answer during the reading process (i.e., line-by-line comprehension monitoring).
  • The overall theme should be:  “Am I really concentrating and processing while I read?”  The questions can be labeled for use at specific points in a text (e.g., following a particular page, paragraph, or line). 
  • At each of these points, they will read and answer the question(s), which should be simple to answer and should focus on specific content presented in the last several sentences. 
  • Questions should emphasize detail rather than overall comprehension.  If they cannot answer the question, they should re-read the section until the correct answer is located. 
  • It may be helpful to keep track of the number of re-readings that are needed, as this will ensure that reading material is set at an appropriate level of difficulty.

• Your client should practice breaking down paragraphs into specific meaningful components.
  • First, he/she should read to discern the main idea.  Then, on a sheet of paper under the headings of “Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How,” they can list specific supporting details about the passage.

• Direct the client to read the summary or review questions first. This helps establish the big picture and underlying meaning of the material.  Then, when the passage is read, the details will make more sense.

• Preview the reading by scanning the headings of a chapter, reading captions under pictures, and identifying any bolded text.

• Skim through each paragraph looking for the topic sentence. There is usually one sentence that will give the basic idea of the whole paragraph.  Finding that sentence will help all the other pieces of the paragraph make sense.

• Visualization techniques can assist comprehension and promote retention (i.e., forming images in your mind as you read).

• Re-reading difficult material with a partner can provide opportunities for listening, questions, discussion, and clarification.

• Your client may benefit from assistive technology support such as access to an electronic text reader.