To help your students improve their reading comprehension, we will first focus on the role and importance of inferences in reading. Often, after reading a text, students must answer questions whose answers are not all explicit in the text. They must then deduce the answers from other information already known or mentioned.
In a second step, we will see several concrete strategies that can be put into practice to improve reading comprehension in your students, while giving them a taste for reading. They must develop their interest in reading since it is present in almost all school subjects.
The role and importance of inferences in reading
About 10% of people have a language disorder. But did you know that 49% of Quebecers have reading difficulties? These people try to avoid situations where they have to read and, when they manage to decode a sentence, they do not understand its meaning. They are called functional illiterates. These are adults who have had the chance to go to school, but whose reading and writing level is very low. Most often, they read out of obligation. It is important to understand that reading is not just about decoding symbols. It is also about reading “between the lines”, that is, taking into account information that is not stated word for word in a text, and making inferences. Students must develop the ability to use their prior knowledge to deduce what is not said or shown explicitly, to understand the implications.
Here are 6 skills that involve inference:
- Make a prediction. Ex.: What will happen next in the story? The student must then imagine a logical sequence.
- Give explanations. Ex.: All questions that require justification: Why…?
- Infer the characters’ feelings. Ex: How does the main character feel in the story?
- Solve a problem. Ex: What could the character do to…
- Make connections with real-life experiences. Ex: Tell a similar story that happened to you.
- Explain anaphora which requires making a connection between a pronoun and what it represents. Ex.: In the sentence “she eats an apple”, who are we talking about when we say “she”?
To understand a text, the child must make a series of inferences, particularly from the 3rd year of primary school, because the answers to the questions asked after reading no longer all appear word for word in the text.
How to Develop Reading Comprehension in Your Students
Instill a love of reading in your student
by encouraging him to read every day, and not just his school texts. access to more than 385 tips that can be easily applied on a daily communicate a love of reading. If your student likes to read, he will read more often. By reading more often, he will develop his sense of competence and enrich his vocabulary. Having a richer vocabulary, he will understand more of what he reads and his school learning will be easier. And having better reading comprehension, he will want to read more often.
Have your student read the title of the story or text
This is a very simple strategy, often forgotten or underused by students. Ask your students what the title means to them and get them to predict the theme or topic of the text.
Have your student look at the pictures or photos within the text or story
This will make it easier for him to make concrete connections with these images when he reads the sentences in the story later.
AAsk yourstudentst to highlight words they don’t understand as they read.
When he doesn’t understand a word, get him to find a word from the same family or a word that looks like it. Al, so ask him to reread the sentence containing the unknown word to try to deduce its meaning.
Have your student visualize the characters, events, and places in the story or text.
This is called mental imagery. Have him summarize each paragraph or short section of the text in his own words before continuing to read. This way, you will ensure that your student has properly stored the information and can imagine it adequately. Remember that by repeating the reading of the same text several times, your student becomes immersed in the narrative structure, pays attention to other details in the illustrations, and refines his or her understanding of a new concept. Reusing a text is necessary for learning and develops a sense of competence in the child.