Strategies for Reading Comprehension

For most second language learners who are already literate in a previous language, reading comprehension is primarily a matter of developing appropriate, efficient comprehension strategies. Some strategies are related to bottom-up procedures and other enhance the top-down processes. Following are such strategies, each of which can be practically applied to your classroom techniques.

1. Identify the purpose in reading
How many times have you been told to read something and you don't know why you're being asked to read it? You end up doing only a mediocre job of retaining what you "read" and perhaps were rather slow in the process. Efficient reading consits of clearly identifying the purpose in reading something. By doing so, you know what you're looking for and can weed out potential distracting information.

2. Skimming
Perhaps the two most valuable reading strategies for learners as well as native speakers are skimming and scanning. Skimming consists of quickly running one's eyes across a whole text (an essay, article, or chapter, for example) to get the gist. Skimming gives readers the advantage of being able to predict the purpose of the passage, the main topic or message, and possibly some of the developing or supporting ideas.

3. Scanning
In the second in the "most valuable" category is scanning, or quickly searching for some particular piece or pieces of information in a text. Scanning exercises may ask students to look for names or dates, to find a definition of a key concept, or to list a certain number of supporting details. The purpose of scanning is to extract certain specific information without reading through the whole text.

4. Semantic mapping or clustering
Readers can easily be overwhelmed by a long string of ideas or events. The strategy of semantic mapping, or grouping ideas into meaningful clusters, help the reader to provide some order to the chaos. Making such semantic maps can be done individually, but they make for a productive group work technique as students collectively induce order and hierarchy to a passage.