Reading Comprehension Strategies

Reading comprehension is a vital skill that has a profound impact in students’ lives. Reading comprehension allows students to acquire meaning from the material they read. Comprehending what students read allows them to understand, summarize, evaluate, and infer content and information. In this blog, I will share two of my favorite reading comprehension strategies that have been very effective in my ESL classroom. I will share the steps of implementing these strategies, the target population, and the rationale and benefits of implementing these reading comprehension strategies in an ESL classroom.

Strategy: Learning Logs

Target Population (The Stages of Second Language Acquisition): Speech Emergence, Intermediate Fluency, Advanced Fluency

Age: All Learners (Grades 1-12)

Setting: Individual/Independent

Steps to Implement:

1. Students can use learning logs as a during-reading strategy.

2. Students write notes about what they understand from a topic/story/subject/theme, and formulate questions about what they don’t understand.

3. In their learning logs, students can write about what they are reading and can include questions that have arise while reading a passage in a text.

4. Teacher responds to the students’ learning logs about once a week.

5. The teacher comments should concentrate on the content and not on grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

6. The teacher takes the opportunity to clarify concepts that the students did not understand.

Rationale and Benefits:

• Writing or summarizing information discussed in class helps students’ memory skills.

• Students have an opportunity to practice their writing skills, develop fluency, clarify ideas, and monitor their own learning.

• Students also get an opportunity to get help from the teacher for their individualize learning needs.

• Learning logs provide teachers with an excellent way to evaluate their students’ progress.

• Learning logs allows teachers to become aware about concepts they need to re-teach or clarify and enables them to make positive changes to their teaching methodology to make sure that all students are learning effectively.

Strategy: Jigsaw Procedure

Target Population (The Stages of Second Language Acquisition): Speech Emergence, Intermediate Fluency, Advanced Fluency

Age: All Learners (Grade 3-12)

Setting: Small Group

Steps to Implement:

1. The teacher explains to students the jigsaw strategy and selects appropriate reading material.

2. The teacher assigns each student a base/home group (jigsaw group) and each group a leader.

3. The base groups are composed of students with different reading skill levels.

4. The teacher divides the text into passages or segments and assigns each student from the base group a segment.

5. Students will read the passage and then join other students from different base groups who have been assigned the same segment.

6. In these “expert groups” students will discuss the main ideas of their segment and practice how they will teach or present this information to their base group.

7. If necessary the teacher provides additional resources to allow students to gain more insight about their assigned segment.

8. Students will join their base group and each student in the base group will teach or explain his/her segment to the rest of the group.

9. While in their base group students ask questions to each other to clarify the main idea of each passage.

10. The teacher is encouraged to provide each base group with a summary chart or graphic organizer to organize the information each expert is providing.

11. The teacher should quiz or test students to ensure clear comprehension of the text.

Rationale and Benefits:

• The jigsaw procedure helps students build reading comprehension.

• The jigsaw procedure engages students in cooperative learning and gives them responsibility for their own learning and the learning of their classmates.

• Engaging students in the jigsaw procedure improves their listening, oral-communication, and problem-solving skills.

• Students will use reflective thinking and critical thinking as they analyze the information being learned, connect it to their prior knowledge, and teach it to their classmates.

Reference:

Peregoy, S.F., & Boyle, O.F. (2013). Reading, Writing, and Learning in ESL: A Resource Book for Teaching K-12 English Learners. (6th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.