Strategies, Practices and Tools
Decades of research provides a clear understanding of how skilled reading develops and how to most effectively support children in learning to read proficiently. Evidence-based, structured literacy instruction develops all the foundational language and literacy skills that must be woven together so that children can make meaning from the words they read.
The information presented here is intended to complement evidence-based core reading curricula and intervention programs already in place and help educators fill in gaps or modify their approaches with effective strategies, instructional practices, and tools and activities to implement them.
Early childhood educators can focus their practices to help children build language and emergent literacy skills. Pre-K and K-3 educators can find evidence-based ways to provide explicit, implicit, and incidental instruction across the essential components of literacy. And English Language Arts teachers across grades 4-12 will find effective practices to help students meet the increasing need for skilled reading.
Instructional Strategy
Provide explicit instruction and practice opportunities to support students’ ability to understand what they are reading.
Students must understand or secure meaning from what is read/decoded; otherwise, students are simply “calling words.” Comprehension is the goal of the act of reading. To be effective “comprehenders,” good readers do the following: activate and use background knowledge, generate and ask questions, make inferences, predict, summarize, visualize, monitor their comprehension. Good readers use these comprehension strategies flexibly while reading texts.
Children who did not show difficulties in word reading or its underlying skills, but had unidentified weaknesses in listening comprehension, are those who often struggle with reading comprehension at a later grade.
Source: Kim, Y. S. G., 2020
For all grades, support students in reading texts independently based on their grade level and scaffold for texts that challenge their reading skill level based on their respective grades.
Effective Practices
- Model reading aloud to support listening comprehension which precedes reading comprehension.
- Read connected texts.
- Use teacher “think alouds” during reading instruction to model good comprehension strategies.
- Provide graphic organizers as a way for students to “hold their thinking.”
- Provide opportunities for students to read widely including motivational strategies to promote wide reading.
- Kindergarten
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- Support students’ listening comprehension so they can decode words.
- Read aloud texts that are semantically and syntactically complex.
- Model the thinking needed for good reading comprehension strategies:
- Activate and use background knowledge
- Generate and ask questions
- Make inferences, predict, summarize, visualize
- Monitor students’ comprehension while reading aloud to develop those “habits of thinking” for students before they become independent decoders.
- Grade 1
-
- Model and support the development of the following comprehension strategies:
- Activate and use background knowledge
- Generate and ask questions
- Make inferences
- Predict
- Summarize
- Visualize
- Teach how to activate and connect to background knowledge.
- Teach how to make connections to the text.
- Teach how to refer to prior experience.
- Provide opportunities for students to build knowledge to support their understanding of the text.
- Teach comprehension monitoring or fix-up strategies.
- Teach students to be aware if they are or aren’t understanding the text.
- Teach students “fix-up” strategies to resolve confusion.
- Specific “fix-up” strategies include rereading text, clarifying words that aren’t recognized and words that are not understood, and/or asking for help.
- Teach students how to ask themselves relevant questions as they read.
- Teach students strategies on how to find answers to teacher questions.
- Teach students different types of questions:
- Right There Questions: The information needed to answer a question that can be found in the text.
- Think and Search Questions: The information needed to answer the question is in different parts of the text, so the student needs to “think and search” to find the answer.
- Author and Me Questions: The student must connect information in the texts with information they already learned to answer the question.
- Teach inferencing and visualizing.
- Teach students how to evaluate or draw conclusions using information from the text.
- Teach students how to use background knowledge and information from the text to make inferences.
- Teach students how to construct mental images to represent the text content. Utilize graphic organizers and think-alouds to help support students in constructing mental images.
- Teach summarizing or retelling.
- Teach students how to synthesize information in a text and restate the information in their own words.
- Teach students how to use story structure questions to summarize a story.
- Teach identifying and using text structure.
- Expose students to a variety of texts containing a range of text structures (e.g. storybooks, historical fiction, fables, poetry, etc.).
- Teach students how to identify the story structure of a text: Narrative or Expository
- Teach students narrative structure has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
- Teach students how to identify narrative story elements (characters, setting, themes, problem/solution, sequence of events) and support students in comparing story events and characters to their own experience.
Source: Lane, 2014; Shannahan et al., 2010; Glass 2020; Biancarosa & Snow, 2006; Texas Educational Agency, 2002; Adler, 2023; Vaughn et.al, 2022
- Model and support the development of the following comprehension strategies:
- Grade 2
-
- Scaffold and support the independent application of the comprehension strategies listed in Grade 1.
- Activate and use background knowledge
- Generate and ask questions
- Make inferences
- Predict
- Summarize
- Visualize
- Provide explicit instruction as needed to further solidify the comprehension strategies listed in Grade 1.
- Scaffold and support the independent application of the comprehension strategies listed in Grade 1.
- Grade 3
-
- Support students’ independent application of the comprehension strategies listed in Grade 1.
- Activate and use background knowledge
- Generate and ask questions
- Make inferences
- Predict
- Summarize
- Visualize
- Support students’ independent application of the comprehension strategies listed in Grade 1.
Tools and Activities
Create a Summary from Expository Text
Sample explicit instructional routine for comprehension; students must be fluent in finding the main idea before learning a summarization.
Download from Florida Center for Reading Research
Identify the Main Idea from Text
Sample explicit instructional routine for listening/reading comprehension.
Download from Florida Center for Reading Research
Related
Developmental benchmarks and literacy behaviors that most children display at a particular age/grade.
Evidence-based reading interventions support students who are identified as struggling with specific foundational literacy skills.
Evidence-based core curricula, interventions, and supplemental programs play a critical role in supporting students’ reading success.
While seemingly effortless, good reading is made up of a set of complex skills and strategies.