“Comprehension instruction in content area classes” Summary

In order to comprehend a text, there is a crucial strategy, “Question asking and answering.” Students should ask and answer questions themselves before, during and after the reading. The first group of strategies is the “Getting-ready-to-read strategies” is to help the students to think about what they are about to read before reading. It includes: “Clarifying a purpose for reading,” “Overviewing the text,” “Activating prior knowledge relevant to the text,” “Making predictions about the text.”  The second group is the “During-and after-reading strategies” helps student understanding, remembering and ascertaining students have comprehend what they have read. This strategy includes: “Attending to text structure,” Creating Oral, Vision or Writing Summaries.” Five common structures are enumeration, compare and contrast, cause and effect, Problem and solution and description. To have good summary, students should delete unnecessary and redundant material; then, using simpler words to replace long descriptions. Last, select or create a topic sentence. Learning these strategies can increase the ability of reading and comprehending for students.