What is reading comprehension?
Reading comprehension is the process of constructing meaning from text. The goal of all reading instruction is ultimately targeted at helping a reader comprehend text. Reading comprehension involves at least two people: the reader and the writer. The process of comprehending involves decoding the writer’s words and then using background knowledge to construct an approximate understanding of the writer’s message.
The Purpose of Reading 
The purpose of reading is to connect the ideas on the page to what you already know. If you don’t know anything about a subject, then pouring words of text into your mind is like pouring water into your hand. You don’t retain much. For example, try reading these numbers:
7516324 This is hard to read and remember.
751-6324 This is easier because of chunking.
123-4567 This is easy to read because of prior knowledge and structure.
Similarly, if you like sports, then reading the sports page is easy. You have a framework in your mind for reading, understanding and storing information.
What are the key principles of reading instruction?
- Teach reading comprehension skills and strategies at all levels of reading development. Teachers at every grade level and every subject area should always be planning how reading assignments will help students develop and practice skills and strategies. Students need teachers to teach and draw attention to appropriate strategy use in textbooks, especially in content areas where there are many reading demands (e.g., language, social studies, and often science). A reading comprehension skill is a developed ability to construct meaning effectively, immediately, and effortlessly with little conscious attention. A reading comprehension strategy is defined as an overt process consciously selected and used by a reader to aid the process of constructing meaning more effectively and efficiently. Once a student uses a strategy effectively, immediately and effortlessly with little conscious attention to construct meaning, it becomes a reading skill. Most planning for comprehension instruction is targeted at teaching comprehension strategies and then developing practice activities that help the student become skilled in the use of the strategy so that it is unconsciously selected and used in a variety of situations.
- Reading comprehension instruction must be responsive. Continually assess progress in learning, make specific instructional accommodations to meet individual student’s needs, and provided individualized and elaborated feedback.
- Reading comprehension instruction must be systematic. Systematic reading instruction is structured, connected, scaffolded, and informative. Structured instruction is characterized by lessons that organize and group new knowledge and skills into segments that can be sequentially presented in a clear manner. Connected instruction is characterized by lessons that show the learner connections between the segments and what is already known. Scaffolded lessons are characterized by instruction in which the teacher provides to students, early in the learning process, a significant amount of support in the form of modeling, prompts, direct explanations, and targeted questions. Then as students begin to acquire the targeted objective, direct teacher supports are reduced, and the major responsibilities for learning is transferred to the student. Informative instruction is characterized by lessons in which the teacher explains the purposes and expected outcomes and requirements for learning and when and how that newly learned information will be useful.
- Reading comprehension instruction must be intensive. Intensive reading instruction means that sufficient time, used wisely and with high student engagement, is provided direct instruction for students to master the reading skills and strategies they need.
- Reading comprehension instruction should involve authentic reading at all stages. Authentic reading involves incorporating a variety of “real” reading materials, such as books, magazines, and newspapers into the instructional process.
- Reading comprehension instruction involves providing opportunities to read for pleasure. Struggling readers don’t read as often or as much as their peers. Reading for enjoyment should be modeled and encouraged at all grade levels. This requires providing ample materials to read at their independent reading level.
- Reading comprehension instruction requires collaboration with other professionals and shared responsibility for student success. All teachers play either a primary or secondary role in teaching students to read. All classroom teachers who expect students to learn the content of specific subjects need to be teaching reading. Studies have shown that one of the most damaging practices affecting struggling readers is the lack of coordination among educators that are responsible for literacy development. Building staff must work together to plan and implement effective instruction in reading comprehension.
Improving Comprehension 
Reading comprehension requires motivation, mental frameworks for holding ideas, concentration and good study techniques. Here are some suggestions.
Develop a broad background.
Broaden your background knowledge by reading newspapers, magazines and books. Become interested in world events.
Know the structure of paragraphs.
Good writers construct paragraphs that have a beginning, middle and end. Often, the first sentence will give an overview that helps provide a framework for adding details. Also, look for transitional words, phrases or paragraphs that change the topic.
Identify the type of reasoning.
Does the author use cause and effect reasoning, hypothesis, model building, induction or deduction, systems thinking? See section 20 for more examples on critical thinking skills.
Anticipate and predict.
Really smart readers try to anticipate the author and predict future ideas and questions. If you’re right, this reinforces your understanding. If you’re wrong, you make adjustments quicker.
Look for the method of organization.
Is the material organized chronologically, serially, logically, functionally, spatially or hierarchical? See section 10 for more examples on organization.
Create motivation and interest.
Preview material, ask questions, discuss ideas with classmates. The stronger your interest, the greater your comprehension.
Pay attention to supporting cues.
Study pictures, graphs and headings. Read the first and last paragraph in a chapter, or the first sentence in each section.
Highlight, summarize and review.
Just reading a book once is not enough. To develop a deeper understanding, you have to highlight, summarize and review important ideas.
Build a good vocabulary.
For most educated people, this is a lifetime project. The best way to improve your vocabulary is to use a dictionary regularly. You might carry around a pocket dictionary and use it to look up new words. Or, you can keep a list of words to look up at the end of the day. Concentrate on roots, prefixes and endings.
Use a systematic reading technique like SQR3.
Develop a systematic reading style, like the SQR3 method and make adjustments to it, depending on priorities and purpose. The SQR3 steps include Survey, Question, Read, Recite and Review. See Section 14 for more details.
Monitor effectiveness.
Good readers monitor their attention, concentration and effectiveness. They quickly recognize if they’ve missed an idea and backup to reread it.
http://www.marin.edu/~don/study/7read.html
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