Reading Comprehension Strategies

A distinction is often made between skills and strategies. Skills are often conceptualized as unitary and automatic. Strategies are conceptualized as complex and effortful. Lysynchuk et al. defined comprehension strategies as “steps or actions that readers can take to enhance comprehension” (p. 460). Other available definitions are similar, but often have subtle distinctions. The National Institute for Literacy defines comprehension strategies as “conscious plans or sets of steps that good readers use to make sense of text.”

The National Reading Panel of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development defined comprehension strategies as “specific procedures that guide [Page 841]students to become aware of how well they are comprehending as they attempt to read and write” (Sec. 4, p. 5).

What is important about these definitions is that they illustrate the diversity in thinking about strategies. However, the definitions all converge on the notion that strategies are cognitive, involving steps or actions, perhaps involving a number of skills. They also suggest that strategies are directed at enhancing, or making possible, the understanding of text.

The National Reading Panel reviewed the experimental research literature on comprehension strategy instruction and found a total of 203 research studies involving 16 different types of instruction of comprehension strategies. Of this total, 7 types of instruction of comprehension strategies were found to have significant scientific support in the literature reviewed by the panel. The 7 types are as follows:

• 1.
  Comprehension monitoring is a strategy in which readers learn how to be aware or conscious of understanding during reading. Readers also learn procedures to correct problems in comprehension as they arise.
• 2.
  Cooperative learning is a strategy in which readers work together to learn from reading. Students may work together on an entire problem or individually on components, sharing the results to complete the understanding.
• 3.
  Graphic and semantic organizers are strategies that allow readers to represent graphically (write or draw) the meanings and relationships of the ideas that underlie the words in the text.
• 4.
  Story structure is a strategy in which the reader learns to ask specific questions about the elements of stories, including plot, time line, characters, and events in the stories.
• 5.
  Question answering is the most conventional strategy in which the reader answers questions posed by the teacher (or the textbook) and is given feedback on the correctness of the answer.
• 6.
  Question generation is a strategy involving the active production of questions in which the reader asks himself or herself what, when, where, why, what will happen, how, and who questions.
• 7.
  Summarization involves the reader identifying and writing the main or most important ideas that integrate or unite the other ideas or meanings of the text into a coherent whole.

There were six additional categories of strategy instruction that did not have scientific support. These categories had too few studies or studies in which the range of student abilities or ages was too small to make judgments about scientific merit. This is an absence of knowledge rather than a judgment that these are ineffective. The categories were Curriculum (integrating strategy instruction into the normal curriculum), Listening Actively (oral language practice in comprehension in memory), Mental Imagery (picturing concepts mentally), Mnemonic (using memory devices), Psycholinguistic (instruction in language elements), and Vocabulary-Comprehension Relationship (emphasizing word knowledge).

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