Reading comprehension: how it works and how to teach it
Reading comprehension is understanding what a text says and means. It depends on two things: reading the words accurately and fast enough, and having the language and knowledge to make sense of them. A student who decodes well but knows little about a topic can still miss the point of a passage about it.
That is why comprehension cannot be taught as a list of skills alone. Strategies such as summarizing, asking questions and checking for sense help, and a few weeks of teaching them pays off. Background knowledge and vocabulary, built over years through reading aloud and talk, matter just as much.
The articles in this section explain the parts of comprehension and how to teach retelling and summarizing. They also show how to ask questions that need thinking and not just finding, and how to read aloud so students learn from books they cannot yet read alone.
Each article includes questions and prompts you can use with your next book.
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Reading comprehension strategies that work, and how to teach them
Which reading comprehension strategies have research behind them, how to teach them without overdoing it, and why knowledge and vocabulary matter as much.
All articles
Background knowledge and reading comprehension: why knowing matters
Why background knowledge drives reading comprehension, what the baseball study found, and practical ways to build knowledge across a school year.Text structure: how to teach students how nonfiction is built
The five common nonfiction text structures, their signal words, how to teach students to spot them, and how structure helps comprehension and writing.Inference: how to teach students to read between the lines
What an inference is, why some students struggle to make them, a clue-plus-knowledge routine for teaching inference, and sample prompts for K to 8.Summarizing: how to teach students what to keep and what to cut
How to teach summarizing: the difference between retelling and summarizing, simple frames for fiction and nonfiction, and how to cut a summary down.Student questioning: teaching students to ask their own questions
Why students who ask their own questions understand more, how to teach question generation, question types to model, and how reciprocal teaching fits in.Read-alouds for comprehension: how to plan them in K to 3
How read-alouds build comprehension in K to 3: choosing books above reading level, planning stopping points, asking good questions, and what to avoid.Comprehension for students who struggle to decode
How to support comprehension for students who struggle to decode: why guessing hurts, how to keep language growing, and how to plan both in one schedule.