Effective Strategies for Reading Comprehension Development
Didactic Principles for Reading Development
This section raises preliminary and general considerations on the development of reading, focusing on the task undertaken by the teacher when setting out to teach reading to a child.
The Roots of Reading Comprehension
Long before a child begins to learn to read, they have already formed certain attitudes towards writing. All culture depends on how the first years of life were lived: whether there are many books or none in their environment, if they often see people reading, or if they begin to look at and see books. The entire family and environment convey a definite attitude towards reading. In this way, children begin to be curious about what any poster or paper means, asking, “What does this say?” or they may feel complete indifference. Therefore, the learning process that begins in school inevitably builds upon these attitudes, which are the roots of reading. Depending on these roots, the school must either correct or enhance them.
The Lifelong Journey of Reading
Learning to read starts long before school and ends long after, concluding with the final understanding of life. Understanding a written text has many levels, and one can always understand it better, more extensively, and more deeply. Therefore, the teaching of reading comprehension should be a general task throughout the school curriculum and should cover all levels and all subjects. In secondary or post-compulsory education, we must understand that students can always be taught to read even better.
Essential Pre-Reading Activities
Before beginning formal reading instruction, children at home engage in a series of games and exercises involving observation, memory, attention, and visual discrimination, which are very important for the further development of comprehension skills. These are often called pre-reading activities or reading preparation. Examples include: games for distinguishing geometric shapes, relating figures, or observing drawings.
Cultivating a Rich Conception of Reading
Based on all we have discussed so far, the school should be able to convey a realistic, rich, and varied understanding of what reading is, how it works, how it is learned, and how it can be improved. This will help students grasp the profound importance of reading for their academic journey, future life, and personal development as individuals.
Techniques and Resources for Reading Instruction
Teaching resources for developing reading comprehension in the classroom are very varied and practically interminable. They range from decoding the text to making sense of it. The overall goal of these techniques is to improve student reading skills.
In the exercise group, exercises for microskills are grouped according to specific comprehension skills to develop, ranging from the most instrumental to the most reflective. The list of microskill exercises includes:
- Perception
- Memory
- Anticipation
- Reading speed and attentive reading
- Inference
- Main ideas
- Structure and form
- Reading between the lines
- Self-evaluation
On the other hand, the technical group emphasizes the characteristics of the exercise: response rate, the activity the student must complete, etc. The most important learning techniques are:
- Questions
- Fill-in-the-blanks
- Pair work
- Information transfer
- Text marking
- Language games
- Text reconstruction
- Comparing texts
- Summarizing
From another point of view, material resources include some key source texts for the class and discuss their most relevant features. These include:
- Press articles
- Literature
- Realia
- Reference materials
- Textbooks
- Student-generated texts
Finally, the kinds of reading cover the basic types typically practiced in school:
- Intensive and extensive reading
- Oralization (reading aloud)
- Silent reading
- Individual and collective reading