Student Learning

Literacy Professional Learning Resource – Teaching Strategies

English home | Literacy Resource home | Overview | Assessment | Key Concepts | Teaching Strategies

Literacy teaching strategies: VELS 1 & 2 | VELS 3 | VELS 4 | VELS 5 & 6

VELS level 1 & 2 – Comprehension strategies

Comprehension strategies are specific cognitive procedures that guide readers to become aware of how well they comprehend as they attempt to read and write. (National Reading Panel 2000)

Effective comprehension instruction is instruction that helps students use both cognitive strategies and text content to arrive at deeper understandings of what they read. It does so in ways that motivate students not just to read but to want to read.

Effective instructional approaches vary in emphasis across the stages of learning. (National Reading Panel 2000)

Resource: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (http://www.nationalreadingpanel.org)

For this stage of learning the following evidence-based comprehension strategies are effective:

Back to Top

Reading aloud

For young students, reading aloud is an effective way to foster comprehension of written language, concept development, and oral language development (Bus, van Ijzendoorn and Pellegrini 1995; Dickinson and Smith 1994).

At the same time, classroom observations reveal that a read-aloud session by itself is not sufficient to increase comprehension. To understand a text, students must be able to relate both their existing knowledge to the words and ideas in the text, and to understand how different kinds of text ‘work’.

This can be a challenging task, especially for students with limited oral language vocabularies (Whitehurst et al. 1994). For read-aloud sessions to be most productive, they should be accompanied by a focused teacher-student talk. The value of talk around book reading is in the way it helps students gain experience with abstract and decontextualised language (i.e. the language used in books to represent ideas and concepts) (Beck and McKeown 2001).

Back to Top

The importance of opportunities to read

The cognitive processes that are necessary for reading develop slowly (Kintsch 1998). Without frequent opportunities to apply these processes, students are not likely to gain expertise in reading comprehension.

There is strong research evidence of the relationship between the amount of reading and reading achievement (e.g. Leinhardt, Zigmond, and Cooley 1981).

‘The frequent admonition for children to ‘Read, read, read,’ makes sense in that extensive reading promotes fluency, vocabulary, and background knowledge. And, greater fluency, vocabulary, and background knowledge support greater comprehension.’ (Cunningham and Stanovich 1990, 1991, 1998; Stanovich and Cunningham 1993; Stanovich and West, 1989; Stanovich, West and Harrison, 1995).

Back to Top

Identifying story elements

Baumann and Bergeron (1993) found that when students in their first year of school were taught explicitly how to identify story grammar elements (setting, characters, problem, event sequence, and solution), they improved their ability to retell and summarise stories, and to transfer these abilities to other stories. The use of story structure in retelling stories has also proven to be an effective technique for improving the comprehension of young children (Morrow 1985; Pellegrini and Galda 1982).

Back to Top

Answering teacher questions

Answering teacher questions has proven to be an effective way of improving young students’ comprehension (Morrow and Gambrell 2001), especially when the questions require students to use sources beyond the ‘right there’ information in a text (Raphael 1986).

Students are often asked comprehension questions based on text that they have read. However, it is important for students to consider pictures used in the text as well.

Follow the lesson exercise ‘ Applying Question–Answer Relationships to Pictures’ at the International Reading Association (http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp)

Back to Top

Students generating their own questions

Young students can be taught to generate their own questions.

As part of a reciprocal teaching program, students in their first year of school were able to generate their own questions (Palincsar and David 1991).

Their success reflected models that provided support and were concrete and easy to use. One such model involved having students combine question signal words ( who, what, where, when, why, how) with question stems, or frames (How are ____and ____ alike? What caused ___? Why is _____important?).

Back to Top

Responding to reading through writing

Writing about reading can improve students’ comprehension in two ways.

  • Reading and writing are both ‘composing’ processes: writers compose meaning as they write; readers compose meaning as they read (Raphael and Englert1989; Tierney and Pearson 1983). Expressing opinions and interpretations in writing helps readers organise their thoughts about a text.
  • Writing provides students with an insight into the tools of the literary trade: how an author’s choice of genre influences his or her writing style, vocabulary use, and text organisation; and how the author uses these tools to make text understandable.