READING COMPREHENSION TUTORING

• 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.

Children who have difficulties with reading comprehension will have trouble understanding information they have just read. People with dyslexia may struggle with reading fluency and comprehension. Read this article to learn more about dyslexia, recognize the signs, impact, support, and accommodations, how to identify the indicators, and get a diagnosis, post-diagnosis steps, approaches, assistance, how to boost self-worth, and many more!

Visualizing and verbalizing help this process by teaching students to create pictures in their minds. Much like making a mini movie of the text they are reading to visualize the main idea. This is also known as concept imagery. Visualizing and verbalizing requite learners to apply their real-world experiences and knowledge to create meaning. By making text-to-self connections, it becomes easier for students to process, recall, and describe information using their own words. By drawing from the mental pictures they created, they can also respond to questions that need specific answers. An example of a visualizing and verbalizing exercise would be to ask a student to describe an object or photo that is presented to them. Once the child has gained adequate mastery of this skill, he or she is then asked to describe an object familiar to them but are not in front of them. This may be their favorite toy, a piece of furniture in their room, or a pet. (Read more about concept imagery in the book Visualizing and Verbalizing: For Language Comprehension and Thinking available on Amazon.com)