7 Comprehension Strategies That Will Make You a Powerful Reader

Contents

What is comprehension?

You were told that comprehension is very important for the 11+ entrance exam. The teacher at the school stressed about comprehension and suggested a lot of reading to get better at it. Sound familiar?

But, what does it really mean? What does it mean to have better comprehension? What skills are necessary to master the art of comprehending texts written by someone else?

Comprehension is the ability to understand complexity in the written text and to be able to connect ideas together to get a clear picture of what the author is intending to convey. Let’s talk about the skills that you can help your child sharpen to get better at comprehending texts.

Visualization

Probably, one of the most important comprehension skills to have is to be able to visualize and see pictures in your mind as you are reading. Your child will naturally enjoy reading the texts that they can visualize and any text that is difficult to visualize will appear boring.

Encourage your child to imagine and see images while reading. Give your child smaller passages to read and ask him/her to visualize that. Any text that your child finds difficult to visualize is your clue to finding the styles that your child struggles with.

Here is a tiny passage that you can ask your child to try and visualize.

Production of a chocolate bar
Chocolate is made from cocoa pods. Cocoa pods are grown and harvested in tropical countries. Ripe cocoa pods are cleaned, fremented, dried and roasted before grinding them into chocolate liquor. Machines are then used to separate cocoa butter.
Cocoa butter is the only fat in the chocolate. Some chocolate makers add extra cocoa butter to give a smooth texture to the chocolate.
The last step in the process is to use a mould to transform the liquid chocolate into a bar shape.

Connecting Ideas

A passage is normally broken into multiple ideas and there are relationships between various components of the passage. It is important that your child is able to pick the various ideas and then string them together to form a meaningful representation of the overall concept.

There are several subskills that go with connecting ideas. Is your child able to get the background context? Having prior knowledge or experience related to the topic always helps a great deal but is not always possible. For example, if the topic is about the airport and your child has been to the airport then it is much easier to visualize and connect.

Is your child able to then connect the text to the background idea or generally find themselves lost in the text? Two questions your child must ask (silently in their head) to decipher the background context,

What is the passage mostly about? What do I see being talked about over and over?
What is the author trying to tell me about in this passage?

Finally, is your child able to understand the author’s perspective? Even better, if your child has his/her own perspective about the concept.

So far we’ve talked about two important comprehension skills to master for comprehension – Visualisation and Connecting Ideas.

Now let’s look at the next two strategies that are equally important for getting deeper into the text. These strategies are related to one of the core functions of the human brain that helps with the process of consideration, reasoning and result in mental representations and producing imagination i.e. thinking.

Thinking happens when additional information is gathered from the outside world and sent to brain cells (neurons) which further interact with the neural network representing existing information.

Exploration

Encourage your child to ask questions before reading, during reading, and after reading. Asking questions will help with connecting, inferring and predicting the ideas in the text which are key comprehension skills to have.

Some of the questions to help with exploration could be,

Before reading
What might be the story about?
What characters might be in the story?
Do I already know about the topic? Does this remind of something?
What do I think the author is talking about?
What might happen in the story?

During reading
Why does the character always carry that bag?
Why is the character saying that?
What emotions is the character feeling?
Do I know anyone in real life that looks like the character?
What is going to happen next?
If I were in the story what would I do? Which character would I like to be?
If I were in the story during this scene what would it smell like?
Wait, what’s going on here?
Am I following the story? At what part did I stop understanding the story?
What is the main idea in the story?

After reading
Which part of the story was my favourite?
What did the author want me to think?
Did the author end the story with a question for me to think about?
Is there going to be a sequel to the book? If there is a sequel, what would it be?
Are there any questions I would like to ask the author?
If I can change the story, what would I like to change?

It is pretty daunting for a child to remember these questions when reading a book, and unfair if you expect them to, but if you help your child practice these by asking them the same then over time this will start to sink in.

In the KidSmart app, we prompt the child with some of these questions to enforce exploratory thoughts.

Additionally, you can ask your child to write a blurb for the story. This forces your child to connect all the ideas in a book and summarize them.

Investigation

As the complexity level of the text increases, you will see more and more text where the author is not directly saying something. The information is delivered in various different ways instead of direct text. Your child will need to read between the lines, connect the plots together, compare ideas and try to infer what the author is trying to say.

Ask your child to give consideration to the tone or the body language of the character when attempting to infer the situation.

Ask your child to investigate the relationship between lines in a paragraph to clarify a single idea and not rely on information on just one statement. The statement in the next line and before may contradict the information.

The ability to infer is an important skill to have in life.

Up to this point, w’ve learned about some of the key strategies that should be mastered for comprehension- Visualisation Connecting Ideas, Exploration and Investigation.

Now let’s talk about organizing evidence, aligned thinking and making sense of the information.

Determining Importance

When you are learning something for the first time you tend to think that everything is important. Children normally have that in them as everything is fascinating for them.

They need to be taught to be able to differentiate between non-essential, essential, interesting and important information. So, the first step in doing this would be to explain the meaning of each of these words.

Then start by talking about the dinosaurs and their fights. If a T-Rex has a fight with a Stegosaurus then who is more likely to win.
What information do you know about or can find out that will be useful in figuring out which dinosaur is likely to win the fight?
What information do you know about these dinosaurs that is interesting information but does not help with determining the outcome of the fight?

It is obviously not going to be that straightforward when your child is reading fiction or non-fiction but it is essential to seed the thinking around the importance. When your child starts to take time to question whether or not a fact or idea is actually important that is when they start to apply critical thinking to comprehension.

Predicting

Making predictions about what’s going to happen next or what the author is going to talk about is a very useful comprehension strategy in which your child can use the information in the text and personal experiences to forecast.

A child who is constantly making predictions during the reading is more likely to get glued to the book than the child who does not. Your child would be focused and constantly thinking ahead.

Prediction as a skill is all about figuring out the outcome of a future event based on the pattern of evidence. It is an important comprehension skill to have for the future as well. This skill is widely used in various disciplines like research, data science, IT and science etc.

Ask your child to keep thinking about what might happen next in the story. Even better if you ask your child to tell you about what’s going to happen next and why.

So far we have covered six comprehension strategies – Visualisation, Connecting Ideas, Exploration, Investigation, Determining Importance and Prediction.

We are finally at the last part of the comprehension skills series and this time we are going to talk about the strategies usually required after reading.

When you are sitting with a friend and feel the urge to recommend a book you don’t just say read that book, instead, you summarize the content of the book in your own words, usually in an attempt to convince your friend to read the book. The better you are able to summarize in your own words the better is your chance to help your friend create a picture in their head.

Synthesizing

When you have read paragraph after paragraph of text, what you want to do towards the end is to put it all together and converge the thoughts to focus on the insights gained from the text; at times even beyond what the author has intended to convey. When you read, your thinking changes as you read and then you merge your existing knowledge with the new insights from the text.

Reading should be exploratory in nature as that helps your child to grow and change with every read. If your child simply parrots back the text that was read then they are not synthesizing the learning with the background knowledge.

This is all about combining information together from various texts including the existing knowledge. In other words, thinking is applied to reading which makes comprehending texts easier.

Summarizing

This is an effective comprehension strategy to help enhance the overall understanding of the text. It requires connecting the ideas together, filtering out the unimportant things from the important ones, converging ideas together with the existing knowledge, be able to relate the different parts and be able to sum it all up in your own words. You may have already noticed that all the skills that we discussed in the previous parts are important ingredients for this strategy.

If your child has just finished reading a story or a book then it’s a very good idea to ask them to explain to you what the story was about. It is not important if they get it right or not, instead, it is important that they are able to link ideas together to come up with their own version of the explanation. Even better if you can ask them to write but that’s not always possible.

Ask them about the important parts of the story and what their views are about why those parts are important.

The most important thing to bear in mind is that every child is different so they will react to the text in different ways. Some children may have Simultaneous processing weakness so may find it difficult to comprehend the text and relate ideas, yet others may have Planning weakness so may find it difficult to plan the reading properly. Continuous practice will help get over the weaknesses and put your child in the path to higher comprehension ability.

I hope that you have gained useful insights and benefited from having a good understanding of the various skills.