8/1/2024

Top 5 Intervention Strategies for Reading Comprehension

What are the most effective reading comprehension strategies for students of all skill levels? 

When it comes to literacy, reading comprehension ties everything together. Looking at Scarborough’s Reading Rope, we see skilled readers are able to use language comprehension skills—such as background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reading, and literacy knowledge—and combine them with word-recognition skills, like phonological awareness, decoding, and sight recognition. Through a combination of these different skills, students are able to work up to fully understanding and creating meaning from what they read. This is reading comprehension.

Scarborough’s “Rope” Model from Handbook of Early Literacy Research, © 2001 by Guilford Press.

Comprehension is what allows so many of us to find joy through the act of reading, and it’s an integral part of the literacy process that many experienced readers take for granted. Teaching students—especially elementary-level students—how to develop their reading comprehension skills can be a daunting task. Every student is going to arrive in class with different skill levels, and oftentimes there aren’t enough resources or time in a day to give students the one-on-one support they might need to succeed.

Despite these barriers, there are multiple intervention strategies teachers can implement to help all of their students with their reading comprehension skills—regardless of their current skill level in other areas of literacy. By guiding students through the process of reading comprehension they will not only be more likely to genuinely enjoy the reading process, but they will also be able to make the jump from learning to read into reading to learn.

How Do You Teach Reading Comprehension?

As with teaching any aspect of literacy, explicit and systematic instruction is incredibly important—this is especially true when it comes to teaching reading comprehension. As this article from the International Dyslexia Association® explains, explicit instruction is characterized by teachers presenting new concepts with clear and direct statements, while also explaining the purpose behind the skill being taught. Teachers should follow explicit explanations by guiding students through activities and exercises. This is an integral part of the Structured Literacy approach and will help students further solidify new information.

Some important elements of explicit instruction include:

1. Sequencing Skills Logically and Breaking Them Down 
   When teaching new skills to students, consider teaching easier concepts before more difficult ones, separating similar ideas to avoid confusion, and prioritizing high-frequency skills before covering less common ones. Along with sequencing lessons properly, make sure you’re breaking down new concepts into smaller, more manageable steps. By segmenting complex ideas into smaller instructional units, students will have an easier time avoiding cognitive overload, strenuous processing demands, and strain on working memory capacity.
2. Focusing on Explicit Lessons & Demonstrations 
   Lessons about new concepts should be explained with clear and concise wording while also maintaining a brisk pace that is quick enough to avoid boredom, yet slow enough to allow students to process new information. In these lessons, provide step-by-step demonstrations as well as plenty of examples and non-examples. Showing students when and when not to use these new skills will help them develop a deeper understanding of the topic at hand, while also learning the appropriate situations for implementing these skills.
3. Offering Practice and Application 
   Throughout your lessons, make sure students stay engaged with the material by requiring frequent responses. This allows you to check for understanding while simultaneously solidifying the information for students. Along with this, provide guided and supportive practice throughout the lesson, increasing difficulty and decreasing guidance as students develop their understanding. Make sure to provide immediate affirmative and corrective feedback throughout instruction, because this will reduce the likelihood of practicing errors and increase the likelihood for success.

Evidence-Based Reading Comprehension Intervention Strategies

There are a multitude of teaching strategies that can be implemented to help students develop their reading comprehension skills, but there are a few methods that lay the foundation for these skills. The following strategies have been studied and backed by research, lending themselves particularly well to in-class teaching methods.

1. Self-Monitoring Comprehension Strategies When students are first learning how to read, it is often difficult for them to self-monitor their level of understanding when reading individual texts. By helping students learn to self-monitor earlier in the literacy process, they will not only be able to form a deeper understanding of the text, but they will feel empowered to take responsibility for their own learning.Provide students with the tools necessary to self-monitor as they read new material. This includes using strategies like rereading, reflecting on what they learned, or using a dictionary to define words they are unfamiliar with. You can also ask students to reflect on their own personal experiences as they read, answering questions about how a text made them feel or asking them why they think a character did or said something.
   
   
2. Summarizing the Main Ideas Having students provide a summary of the text in their own words requires them to not just identify the key points of the story, but to put those main ideas into their own words. Along with this, summarizing allows students to make connections between ideas and begin developing their understanding of the way the text is organized. By having students summarize, teachers are able to assess how much the student understood from the reading and determine where they can best support them moving forward.
   
   
3. Making Predictions Asking students to make predictions throughout the reading process is a great way to exercise their comprehension skills. As the students read, they can be prompted to make predictions about what will happen next—or how the story will end—to keep them engaged and applying their background knowledge throughout the reading process.
   
   
4. Graphic Organizers Graphic organizers are an especially helpful tool for teaching reading comprehension to students who are visual learners. These charts can be Venn diagrams, storyboards, mind maps, cause and effect charts, story maps, and so many more. Through these diagrams, students are able to see what the key concepts of the text are, as well as how each concept connects to one another.
   
   
5. Question-Answer Relationship Strategy (QAR) The Question-Answer Relationship Strategy (QAR) is a great way to get students involved with the text they are engaging in. Once they have completed a text, the QAR strategy gives students a structure that guides them into asking different types of questions. 
   There are four types of questions in the Question-Answer Relationship Strategy:

• Right There: These are questions with answers that can be found directly in the story. They typically start with who, what, when, where, why, or how.
• Think and Search: One step past “right there,” the answers to these questions can be found within the text, but they require students to search to find them. These answers have to do with summarizing, comparing and contrasting, or finding specific examples of something in the text.
• Author and You: Going another step further, these types of questions ask students to relate the text to their own personal experiences. They might ask students to predict what happens next, determine the main idea, or question details within the text.
• On My Own: These types of questions ask students to reflect on what they have read, and directly relate the text to their personal knowledge and experiences. The teacher might ask questions starting with “have you ever…?” or “how would you feel if…?”

The Most Effective Reading Comprehension Strategies

All of these intervention strategies for reading comprehension are evidence-based and lend themselves well to in-class instruction, but they’re also extremely effective when used with small-group or individualized programs.

At Lexia®, we recognize teaching literacy can be overwhelming, which is why we provide professional learning solutions to support teachers in literacy instruction. Through these courses, teachers are provided with evidence-based instructional strategies backed by the science of reading. Lexia is here to help teachers support their students in becoming successful readers using research-backed techniques.

For more information, check out how research-based literacy intervention techniques can help students become better and more confident readers.