Reading Comprehension

Reading Comprehension might be the most important skill teachers teach. Unfortunately, most teachers do not view themselves as reading teachers. Even foreign language teachers, who teach reading skills as an integral part of the curriculum, do not necessarily see themselves as reading teachers. However, teachers of all content areas need to view themselves as reading teachers, or even reading specialists. Each content area has different approach to teaching reading comprehension due to the different text structures represented in the various content areas.

Unfortunately, many teachers do not take the time to teach the skills necessary to reading the specialized texts of their content area. Many teachers simply assign reading passages for homework without really scaffolding student learning. Many teachers leave students alone with their textbooks and rely on the questions at the end of textbook chapters to check for comprehension. This practice alone will not help students learn the material. They need to be presented with pre-reading activities that activate prior knowledge and prepare them to take in new information. They also need to be taught during reading strategies to help them really understand the information they are reading and make sense of the new information. Then they need after-reading activities that stretch them into higher order thinking skills so that they will better retain the information they learned because they are using it in a real and meaningful way. Teachers need an array of pre-, during, and after reading activities that can be adapted to suit the texts they use in their classrooms. Bean, Baldwin, and Readence offer some practical examples in chapter 6 of their book.