Comprehension Instruction

Instructional Strategies and Activities to Teach and Improve Inferencing

• Graphic Organizers for Mental Models For students who struggle with remembering enough details from the text to be able to make inferences, teachers should support the construction of a mental model when reading.  Graphic organizers can help to create this mental model for students.  Story maps and concept maps are visual tools that help students to build their mental models of a text.

• Give opportunities to make inferences outside of a text. Start small with single sentence inferences and build to short stories.  Here is an example from Oakhill, Cain and Elbro:  "Sleepy Jack was late for school again." Stimulate inferencing with a question, such as " Why was Jack late for school?".  Students can infer that Jack was late for school because he overslept or because he was tired when he woke up and didn't get out of bed on time.  (2015)       

• Use questions to stimulate inferencing  Use the 5 w questions (Who, What Where, When, Why [why questions stimulate causal inferencing]) and add in questions that help students relate what they are currently reading in a text to information presented earlier in the text, for example: "How does the sentence you just read connect with something you read before in the story/text?" (Oakhill, Cain,& Elbro, 2015)

• Work with students in small groups to help with their inferencing skills.  Students need the opportunity to interact with the text and the teacher in a small group setting to maximize conversation and opportunities to reason with the text.

Instructional Strategies to Improve the Monitoring Comprehension

• Ask students if what they are reading makes sense and why they think it doesn't make sense if it does not.  Initiating conversations around comprehension difficulty is beneficial to students because it lets them know that even adult readers don't always understand everything they read on the first go.  

• Teach students to be self-questioners. Good readers question themselves and the text as they read. Students should ask themselves questions as they read, such as:

  • Do I know this word?  What does this word mean?

  • How is this connected to what I already read?

  • Do I understand what the author is saying here?

  • Why did (character) do that?

  • How did (action) affect (character)?

  • What made (effect) happen?

• Have students stop to summarize what they have read so far. When you prepare a text for your students, identify places where you will have them summarize what they have read.  Be sure to give feedback on these summaries, to help students understand how to summarize effectively. Self-directed summarization, such as the type included in the Reciprocal Teaching method, is also helpful in getting students to monitor their comprehension.

• Teach visualization strategies.  Students can visualize a story as a series of mental images. This helps students to integrate newly read information into what they have previously read.  One GLAD strategy, Listen and Sketch, involves students in listening to a story read aloud, and sketching what they have heard so far.  At each stopping point in the story, the students add to their drawings.  The sketches can then be used to retell the story to a partner and even to write a summary later on.  Also, check out Orton-Gillingham's Visualizing for Comprehension.

• Think aloud about your own comprehension monitoring. Model how to monitor comprehension using different standards: unfamiliar words, information that doesn't make sense to you, or places where the author appears to contradict themselves.  Show students how you know you aren't understanding, ask yourself questions about the text, tell students why you aren't understanding, and spotlight a strategy that can be used to fix-up your comprehension.  

Post-Reading Instructional Strategies, Activities, and Routines

Types of activities you can use to engage your students:

• Return to the KWL chart If you used a KWL chart, return to it to note any misconceptions students might have had at the outset of the reading and note any new learning that occurred. 

• Create a "preview" or "trailer" for the text.  One of the best parts of going to the movies is the trailers that preview coming attractions.  Have your students create a trailer for the book, story, or informational text that can be shown to future students or other classes who haven't read that text yet.  Students can work in groups, pairs, or as individuals to create the trailers.

• Write a letter to the author.  Students can write to the author to ask questions about the text, inform the author about their likes and dislikes surrounding the text, or share their own personal insights gleaned from their reading. 

• Write short plays or movie scripts based on a narrative text. Groups can take roles in the production of these scripts for each other, in a video, or for other classes at your school.

• Genre-flip the text.  Have students rewrite a portion of the text in a different genre. Turn a narrative into a poem, or an informational text into a friendly letter. Bending the genre of a text helps students develop a deeper understanding of the language used to convey ideas as well as a better understanding of the ideas themselves.

• Extended Anticipatory Guide If you used an anticipatory guide in your pre-reading activities, have students return to it to note any changes to their ideas.  Pair your students and have them discuss how their ideas have been solidified or changed as a result of the reading.  

• Mind Mirror  Students work in groups of 3 or 4 to create a mind mirror poster that details the journey of one of the characters in the story.  Students must include quotations from the text, a central image, symbols, and an original statement that reflects the character. 

• Storyboard Students storyboard a fictional or informational narrative (such as a biography or sequential description of an event).  This activity can stand alone or can be incorporated into a longer activity in which students write a play or movie script and produce that script as a video or live drama event. For online storyboarding, try StoryboardThat

• Socratic Seminar Great for older students.  Socratic seminars are group discussions based on a text in which the members of the group engage in the discussion through the use of open-ended questions and answers. The teacher usually acts as the leader, using questions to stimulate discussion.  This is not a debate, but a discussion of ideas in which the participants reflect on their own understandings, state their ideas and respond to the ideas of others. 

• Flipgrid Use Flipgrid to give your students a chance to voice their ideas about the text.  Prepare the grid with a few questions for students to respond to and give a rubric to help students understand what makes a good response. Another use for Flipgrid is to use it to record student retellings of a story.