Comprehension

Advance Academic Reading and
Writing
Comprehension
WHAT IS COMPREHENSION?
• Comprehension is:
• The goal or purpose for reading
• The process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning
through interaction and involvement with written language
• Understanding beyond knowing
• Comprehension is not a product of reading. Rather, it requires
purposeful, thoughtful, and active interactions between the reader,
the text, the activity, and the sociocultural context.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
• Comprehension is critically important to the development of
children’s reading skills.
• it’s the essence of reading.
• It is a complex cognitive process that requires an intentional and
thoughtful interaction between the reader and text.
• Development and application of comprehension strategies is
intimately linked to student success.
CONT…
Understanding
• Explicitly stated information
• Inferred ideas
• Conceptual meaning
• Function of sentences and utterances
• Relation within sentences
• Relation between parts of the text
What Do Proficient Readers Do To Enhance Their Comprehension?
• Proficient readers use a number of different cognitive strategies in the

process of interacting with texts and constructing meaning. (Harvey
and Goudvis, 2000) Constructing meaning refers to building
knowledge and promoting understanding.
• Activate background knowledge and make associations or
connections with text
• Ask questions before, during, and after reading
• Visualize and use sensory images and emotions
Cont…
• Use awareness of the purpose in reading the text, text forms and
features, and then make decisions about reading rate based on this
awareness.
• Verify or change predictions based on the text and/or what is known
about an author and his/her style
• Read selectively, fluently, and decode rapidly
• This information is based on the
Reading Comprehension Strategies
• Questions
• Think-Aloud
• Uses Prior Knowledge
• Infers
• Visualizes
• Determines What’s Important
• Synthesizes
Questions
What is it?
• Strong readers ask questions before, during, and after reading.
Why is it important?
• The questions clarify our understanding and focus our reading. They
also help us to move forward and dig deeper into the text.
• “Thick and Thin questions” (great for use in the content areas with
nonfiction)
• Encouraging Inferential Thinking- use of questioning with poetry
Think aloud
What is it?
• Effective way to open a window into students’ reading processes.
• With this strategy, teachers verbalize aloud while reading a selection
orally. Their verbalizations include describing things they're doing as
they read to monitor their comprehension. The purpose of the think-
aloud strategy is to model for students how skilled readers construct
meaning from a text.
• Helps determine what students do and don’t do as they read. Reveals
what strategies they use while reading and ways to improve.
Use Prior Knowledge
What is it?
• Helping students recall information from their own experiences to
make connections to texts.
• Making connections from the text to prior knowledge helps integrate
new information with what is already known.
Inferencing
What is it?
• Inferencing is combining schema and background knowledge with
clues provided in the text to form a new idea.
• Making an inference involves using what you know to make a guess
about what you don't know or reading between the lines. Readers
who make inferences use the clues in the text along with their own
experiences to help them figure out what is not directly said.
Cont.…
• Inferential comprehension includes a number of skills under one
umbrella:
• Prediction
• Drawing conclusions
• Prior knowledge
• Context clues
• Figurative language
Visualizes
What is it?
• Taking the words of the texts and mixing them with the readers
preconceived ideas to create pictures in the mind
• Combining the author’s words with our background knowledge allows
students to create mental images that enhance our understanding of
the text and bring life to reading.
• When we visualize, we are inferring, but with mental images rather
than words and thoughts; like creating a movie in our mind.
Determining What’s Important
What is it?
• Determining the important events, themes, key ideas as we read
• Students need to see the “big picture” and not get bogged down with
small details. They need support in sifting through details and
deciding what is important to remember and what is not
Synthesizing
What is it?
• Synthesizing is when readers change their thinking as they read. They
are working to put together all of the strategies you have taught them
to form thoughts, opinions and conclusions.
Why it’s important?
• Enhances understanding and better constructs meaning.

Comprehension

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Advance Academic Reading and

• Proficient readers use a number of different cognitive strategies in the

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