reading comprehension

ESP FOR PRIMARY
TEACHER

“READING
COMPREHENSION”

FEBRIANTI VALENTINE PARUMBUAN
1847041079
M7.8

DOSEN PENGAMPUH: NURHAEDA, S.PD., M.PD.

READING COMPREHENSION

Reading comprehension is the ultimate goal when teaching your child to
read. After all, when a child struggles with comprehension, reading can
be a miserable chore.Reading comprehension is the ability to fully under
stand what is being read.

A person with great reading comprehension can visualize, question, and
interpret what they are reading, and they can think about their own feelin
gs and opinions while reading text. The comprehension process is mostl
y unconscious—it happens without our active involvement or awareness
.

There are some prerequisites for good reading comprehension. If any of
these skills are lacking, comprehension will be lacking as well:
• Decoding skills
• Fluency
• Vocabulary
•Background knowledge

But even when these foundational skills are present, reading comprehe
nsion is not necessarily automatic. Some important strategies may still b
e required.

What Reading Comprehension Strategies Are Helpful? Good
readers use many different strategies. Some strategies are u
sed at a conscious level, while others are employed unconsci
ously. Depending on the purpose for reading and the difficulty
of the text, effective strategies may include those listed in the
chart below.

3 Things NOT to Do When Teaching Comprehension While it
is important to teach comprehension strategies to your stude
nt, it’s also important to realize that these strategies are tools
and not the main goal. It’s imperative that you avoid focusing
too much on individual comprehension strategies.
Don’t assume that your child is comprehending just because
she can decode all the words. Make sure that she understan
ds what she is reading and isn’t just “word calling.”

Don’t confuse comprehension with being able to answer liter
al questions. When working with beginning readers, it is som
etimes helpful to ask a literal question such as “what did Jack
buy at the store?” but be sure to move on from shallow questi
ons. Focusing on literal questions not only bores your student
, but also discourages in-depth interactions with the text. Don
’t spend too much time teaching a single comprehension strat
egy. Good readers use many different strategies, often simult
aneously. Over-emphasizing a single strategy will make readi
ng harder than it needs to be. For example, when students ar
e constantly asked to compare and contrast, meaning can be
lost (as well as motivation for reading). More time should be s
pent reading interesting books than working on comprehensi
on strategies.

Background Information Is Crucial for Reading Comprehension I
n order to make sense of what you read, you need to have bac
kground knowledge. Before a child can understand the short st
ory “Pirate Food,” for example, it is important that she have so
me familiarity with different foods and pirate dialects.
Reading aloud to your child is one of the best ways to help de
velop background knowledge. Reading a wide variety of books
helps build a storehouse of knowledge of places, events, emoti
ons, vocabulary, and language structure. Other methods of buil
ding background knowledge include travel, hands-on activities,
workshops, and discussions. Your child will later draw upon this
information when she is reading independently.
Exposure to a wide variety of books and experiences help your
child distinguish reality from fantasy, recognize cause-and-effec
t, understand character motivation, and make predictions about
what she is reading.

THE 7 READING COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES

➢ MONITORING COMPREHENSION STRATEGY
What is the Monitoring Comprehension Strategy?
Put simply, monitoring refers to the process of assessing your understan

ding of something as you read it. It requires you to pay attention to y
our own thinking as you read a text. As with all of our reading strate
gies, this requires students to develop their metacognition - thinking
about thinking. Employing this strategy asks us to notice our own tho
ughts and filter through them to identify what is new in our reading,
what questions arise, what background knowledge do we have and w
hat are the inferences that we are making as we read.

➢ VISUALIZATION COMPREHENSION STRATEGY
What Is the Visualization Comprehension Strategy?
Visualization involves the construction of mental images with the purpos

e of drawing meaning from a text. When engaged in visualization, stu
dents will form pictures in their minds of what they have read as they
read it.

THE 7 READING COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES

➢ ACTIVATING PRIOR KNOWLEDGE COMPREHENSION STRATEGY
What Is the Activating Prior Knowledge Comprehension Strategy?
This comprehension strategy encourages students to make connections

between what they’re reading and their own experiences. In the proc
ess, the student’s reading becomes more personally meaningful.
➢ QUESTIONING COMPREHENSION STRATEGY
What Is the Questioning Comprehension Strategy?
This comprehension strategy encourages students to think critically abou
t what they read, as well as helps students to develop their own sens
e of curiosity. Just as we ask our students questions in order to stimul
ate their thinking, students ask themselves questions about a text to
kick start their exploration of the text in pursuit of understanding. Qu
estioning ensures students engage closely with a text, making readin
g more than just a passive pursuit in the process.
➢ INFERRING COMPREHENSION STRATEGY
What Is the Inferring Comprehension Strategy?
Using this strategy requires the student to become something of a textu
al detective. It helps students to understand things that 9 are not ma
de explicit in the text. It’s what we mean when we say to students “Re
ad between the lines!”

THE 7 READING COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES

➢ SUMMARIZING COMPREHENSION STRATEGY
What Is the Summarizing Comprehension Strategy?
Summarizing means that students retell the story or information in the t

ext they’ve read in their own words. To do this successfully, they need
to be able to pull out the main points of the text and express these i
n their own words. To summarize effectively, the student must expres
s the gist of the text. This requires them to identify the essential idea
s and consolidate the most important elements of the text that supp
ort these ideas.
➢ DETERMINING IMPORTANCE COMPREHENSION STRATEGY
What Is the Determining Importance Comprehension Strategy?
There is a sorting process that students must learn if they are to successf
ully navigate their way through the ocean of words that await them.
They’ll need to learn to continuously prioritize the information that th
ey come across when reading. In the determining importance reading
comprehension strategy, students look for clues in the text to help th
em sort the bits of information in the text into a hierarchy of relative
value.

6 STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE READING COMPREHENSION

➢ Have them read aloud. This forces them to go slower, which g
ives them more time to process what they read and in turn impr
oves reading comprehension. Plus, they're not only seeing the
words — they're hearing them, too! You can also take turns rea
ding aloud.
➢ Provide books at the right level. Make sure your child gets lot
s of practice reading books that aren't too hard. They should rec
ognize at least 90 percent of the words without any help and sto
pping any more often than that to figure out a word makes it tou
gh for kids to focus on the overall meaning of the story.
➢ Reread to build fluency. To gain meaning from text and encou
rage reading comprehension, your child needs to read quickly a
nd smoothly — a skill known as fluency. By the beginning of 3rd
grade, for example, your child should be able to read 90 words
a minute.

6 STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE READING COMPREHENSION

➢ Talk to the teacher. If your child is struggling with reading co
mprehension, they may need more help with building their voca
bulary or practicing phonics skills. A teacher can weigh in on th
e best next steps to take.
➢ Supplement their class reading. If your child's class is studyi
ng a particular theme, look for easy-to-read books or magazine
s on the topic. Some prior knowledge will help them make their
way through tougher classroom texts and promote reading com
prehension.
➢ Talk about what they're reading. This "verbal processing" hel
ps them remember and think through the themes of the book. A
sk questions before, during, and after a session to encourage r
eading comprehension.