STATEN ISLAND READING COMPREHENSION TUTORING

Comprehension begins as the student identifies the initial meaning from previewing a text or source material and builds as he or she continues to read. Once reading is done, a deeper understanding of the text is achieved by reviewing, rereading portions of the material, discussion, and reflection. Throughout this process, the reader also relates new information to his or her own experiences or current knowledge. Improving one’s comprehension skills can be done through the following strategies:

• Making connections or using background knowledge – Students relate new information with existing knowledge they acquired from their own experiences, other texts, and real-world events.
• Asking questions – Students ask themselves questions as they go through the text. This helps the reader process and summarize information and identify main ideas and underlying meanings.
• Visualizing – Creating mental images or “movies” of what they are reading to better understand events and situations in the text.
• Determining the importance of a text – This means that a student can differentiate between crucial and interesting information and fact and opinion; identify cause and effect, themes; compare and contrast ideas; determine problems and solutions; summarize; list steps in a process; and recall information that answer specific questions.
• Making inferences – Taking clues from the text and combining it with their background knowledge and identify underlying themes.
• Synthesizing – Integrating new information with existing knowledge to create original ideas or new perspectives.

Best to tackle these 4 sentences types for  reading comprehension:

• Passive voice
• Adverbial clauses and temporal and causal conjunctions
• Center-embedded relative clauses
• Sentences with three or more clauses

• Predicting
• Think-alouds (monitoring comprehension)
• Constructing, revising and questioning meanings made while reading
• Determining the meanings of unfamiliar words and concepts
• Monitoring understanding and making adjustments as needed
• Using different approaches to specific genres of text
• Paying attention to characters and settings while reading narratives (e.g. understanding story and text structure)
• Constructing and revising summaries while reading expository text
• Using graphic and semantic organizers.

Read more about Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension and 2021 Reading Model for Fluency, Comprehension, Self-Regulation, and Vocabulary.