Multiple Comprehension Strategies
Before reading a text, students who are strategic often do the following:
- Activate background knowledge related to the text.
- Preview the text in order to make predictions and/or visualize the upcoming content.
- Ask questions about the text.
During their reading, students who are strategic often do the following:
- Predict future events/content in the text.
- Monitor their own understanding.
- Use fix-up strategies when they come to content they don't understand or remember (reread, use resources, decode, change speed, etc.)
- Generate questions about the reading.
- Make inferences.
- Make connections between ideas, concepts, and characters in the text.
- Synthesize by combining information from different sources, combining it with their background information.
- Visualize what is happening.
- Take notes.
- Evaluate the text: Is it believable? Is it interesting? Is it well written?
- Construct responses to the text.
After they have read the text, students who are strategic often do the following:
- Generate questions about the text.
- Summarize and identify the main idea of the text.
- Recall content.
- Extend the knowledge gained from text to other reading, writing, speaking, or art activities.
- Evaluate the content and ideas in the text.
- Outline the text.
- Use text as a stepping stone for further reading.
Excerpt from Reading Instruction for Students Who Are at Risk or Have Disabilities, by W.D. Bursuck & M. Damer, 2007 edition, p. 273.
© 2007, Merrill, an imprint of Pearson Education Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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