Teaching Reading Comprehension

There was a period between 1969 to about 2000 that a number of "strategies" were devised for teaching students to employ self-guided methods for improving reading comprehension. In 1969 Anthony Manzo designed and found empirical support for the ReQuest, or Reciprocal Questioning Procedure, it was the first method to convert emerging theories of social and imitation learning into teaching methods that employed these powerful factors in learning through a very clever use of a talk rotation between students and teacher that has come to be called cognitive modeling. Prior to this breakthrough most all comprehension teaching were based on imparting selected techniques that when taken
together would allow students to be strategic readers however in 40 years of testing these methods never seemed to win support in empirical research. One such strategy for improving reading comprehension is the technique called SQ3R. This stands for Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review. In order to get an understanding of the text, you should survey the chapters. This consists of quickly looking at the title, headings and any subheadings. Look at any end of chapter questions as well. While surveying, you ask questions about the topics you have scanned, such as, "What did my teacher say about this chapter?"

The next thing is to begin reading. In a chapter book, you would read the majority of the words. In a textbook, just read quickly for the key words. These are words seen in the chapter questions, teacher made questions and in the titles or subtitles of the chapter.

After reading a portion or section of the book, recite what you have read out loud. By orally summarizing what you just read it helps to cement the content in your memory.

The last technique is to review what you have read again. By writing down key facts from the chapter and reviewing it, you will better understand the information.

Reading comprehension and vocabulary are inextricably linked. The ability to decode or identify and pronounce words is self-evidently important, but knowing what the words mean has a major and direct effect on knowing what any specific passage means. Students with a smaller vocabulary than other students comprehend less of what they read and it has been suggested that the most impactful way to improve comprehension is to improve vocabulary^.