Teaching comprehension STRATEGIES

Comprehension is both a pathway to reading an end product of reading. Students need to develop a repertoire of strategies that they can select from purposefully and independently to build and enhance their understanding of text and to extend their critical awareness.

The main comprehension strategies that proficient readers use are:

• making connections between texts and their prior knowledge;
• forming and testing hypotheses about texts;
• asking questions about texts;
• visualising;
• inferring meaning from texts;
• identifying the writer's purpose and point of view;
• identifying the main idea or theme in a text;
• summarising the information or events in the texts;
• analysing and synthesising ideas, information, structures, and features in text;
• evaluating ideas and information.

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