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Teaching Reading: Strategies & Methods

Various studies show that promoting reading can have a major impact on children and their future. In this article, we’ll look at strategies and methods to support the teaching of reading and comprehension in early elementary school and beyond.

There’s more than one way to teach children to read. So, it’s important to have a range of different strategies and methods to encourage learning in different students.

Teaching reading: strategies & methods

  1. Read aloud to students
  2. Provide opportunities for students to read, write and talk about texts
  3. Read texts repeatedly to support fluency
  4. Teach children the tools to figure out words they don’t know
  5. Provide time for studying spoken language, including vocabulary and spelling
  6. Use prior knowledge to make connections
  7. Predict
  8. Visualize
  9. Summarize
  10. Teach critical thinking skills

The early years: strategies for teaching reading

Literacy teaching and learning are core responsibilities of teachers and schools. Yet teaching reading and writing is a complex and highly skilled professional activity. Many young learners start school with little knowledge about how to read and write. Teachers are tasked with helping children to bridge the significant gap between linking their written and spoken language. Learning to read is critical, with research showing that reading for pleasure can:

  • Promote improved health and wellbeing
  • Help build social connections and relationships
  • Increase the chances of social mobility.

Literacy development is an evolving and non-linear process that encompasses foundational skills (phonemic awareness), word recognition, reading fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension (Simms & Marzano, 2018).

For a student’s ultimate success, teachers must:

  • Understand how students learn these skills, and
  • Implement best practices when teaching these skills.

Learning to read should include exposure to a wide variety of exciting books from different genres. Students should also experience reading through different mediums, such as interactive apps and web content.

Here are 10 strategies you can use to support your students in developing their reading skills and boosting comprehension.

1. Read aloud to students

Read-aloud regularly in the classroom and encourage parents to do the same at home. Reading aloud has many benefits for students, including improving comprehension, building listening skills, and broadening their vocabulary development.

2. Provide opportunities for students to read, write, and talk about texts

Regularly giving students time to read, write, and talk about texts can enhance their skill development across multiple areas. For instance, reading more helps you become a better writer. By talking about texts and hearing the perspectives of classmates, young children also have the opportunity to deepen their comprehension. Encourage parents to further engage young readers by asking them to help their child attack difficult words and ask questions about the text that will promote discussions.

3. Read texts repeatedly to support fluency

Allow students to read the same texts multiple times. By doing this, they not only build fluency but also build confidence. The more confident they become in their reading skills, the more likely they will enjoy reading.

4. Teach children the tools to figure out words they don’t know

Teaching students to read for the ultimate goal of producing independent readers begins by explicitly teaching the code we use to decode words. That starts with teaching phonemic awareness.

Here are some other strategies that support phonics instruction:

  • For beginning readers, target words that are decodable. These are regular spellings with regular sounds. (Ex. such – /s/ /u/ /ch/ not gone)
  • Sound out each phoneme and blend as you go by going back to the first sound everytime a sound is added. Hold the sound (sing) then add the next sound. Ex. /g/, /r/, gr—, /ow/, grow.

Note: Students may want to look at pictures for context, but this does not help them decode words. As we encourage students to read more difficult texts, they won’t have pictures to rely on, so encourage them not to use the pictures to decode difficult words.

This might involve combining strategies, such as:

  • Sounding out a word using phonics knowledge
  • Looking at the pictures
  • Skipping the word and coming back to it after reading the rest of the sentence
  • Thinking about what would make sense.

As an elementary teacher, you can support the families of your young students by sharing phonics resources. By providing parents with practical resources, you are setting them up for a productive and positive reading experience with their child.

5. Provide time for studying spoken language, including vocabulary and spelling

A comprehensive approach to teaching reading also includes providing time to develop complementary skills, such as:

  • Spoken language, including through conversation or oral presentations
  • Vocabulary, such as building class lists while reading texts
  • Spelling
  • Grammar, such as through bite-sized video content like the Grammar Miniclips series.
6. Use prior knowledge to make connections

Each student brings unique prior knowledge to their reading education. This knowledge is the sum of all experiences they bring to the reading or viewing of a text. This could include personal experiences, cultural or religious experiences and concept knowledge. Prior knowledge helps young readers infer meaning from text, a skill recognized as a predictor of reading comprehension at various developmental stages and one of the drivers of sophisticated reading ability. An early reader can activate prior knowledge and make connections at each stage.

  • Before reading, they could ask ‘What do I already know about this topic?’
  • During reading, they could reflect ‘This part of the text is just like…’
  • After reading, they could offer ‘I know more about this topic now.’
7. Predict

Prediction is about anticipation and working out the actions and ideas coming next. An early reader can use prediction at each stage of reading.

  • Before reading, they could suggest ‘From the cover, I think this book will be about…’
  • During reading, they could predict which word comes next in a sentence.
  • After reading, they could comment on whether their predictions were correct.
8. Visualize

Visualizing combines using your senses and activating prior knowledge to create a mental picture. Ask students to create a “mind movie.” Young readers, especially with a teacher or parent prompting, can draw on their senses to imagine smells, sounds, tastes, and images that go with the story they are reading – like a show or movie in their mind.

9. Summarize

Teaching students to recall the main points or ideas of a story is not easy. First, they need to be able to put the story in order, then put it in their own words before they can articulate a ‘summing up’ of the author’s main ideas. To start to learn to summarize, young students can practice:

  • Selecting the key words from a paragraph
  • Locating the topic sentence (often found at the start or end of a paragraph)
  • Responding to general questions about a story
  • Talking through the story in their own words
10.
Teach critical thinking skills

Critical thinking gets readers to think about why an author creates a text in a particular way (author’s purpose). You can encourage young readers to ask some of the following questions to get them thinking critically about what they are reading:

  • Why did the author write this story?
  • What did the author leave out of the story?
  • How do I feel about this story?

Reading comprehension strategies

Opportunities for teaching reading comprehension occur at all levels throughout the curriculum. Good comprehension draws from both linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the world we live in. Students develop skills in comprehension though high-quality discussion with teachers, and from regularly reading and discussing a range of texts across genres. Therefore, the reading strategies discussed earlier in the article should be practiced, consolidated and expanded on as a student progresses through school.

Growing readers must learn to read on the lines, between the lines, and beyond the lines. Reading will involve literal, interpretive, and inferential comprehension as it deepens in complexity. As students get more advanced, they’ll learn concepts such as transferring knowledge to new contexts and understanding an author’s viewpoint, purpose, and intended audience. And when they acquire those skills, they’ll be able to critically analyze messages and information in a range of literacy modes for various purposes.

Recommendations for teachers to support the progression of reading comprehension:

  • Make sure your students spend significant amounts of time reading engaging texts.
  • Select texts for students which support authentic learning. These could include topic-based or interest-based texts.
  • Give students access to a range of texts in various genres (multimodal, print-based, images, animations, graphic representations, video, audio, diagrams/charts, newspapers/magazines, fiction, non-fiction).
  • Identify and discuss vocabulary from rich texts with your students.
  • Give your students time to talk to each other about the texts they have read and listened to.
  • Give students time to write and reflect on their reading.

Bring English language arts classes to life for your students

ClickView offers a huge range of educational videos for use in your ELA classes for elementary, middle and high school students. We regularly produce high-quality, curriculum-aligned videos and add these to the collection.

Browse English Language Arts Resources

The Basics of Teaching Reading and Writing

Teaching reading is a hugely complicated task. So much so that researcher Louisa Moats ended up entitling her influential article "Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science." (This, incidentally, also became the basis for the Reading Rockets name!)

To strengthen your skills in teaching reading and writing, you may want to try our self-paced online course, Reading 101: A Guide to Teaching Reading and Writing

Oral Language

Oral language encompasses both speaking and listening. Oral language skills include learning how spoken words sound, what words and sentences mean, and how to communicate ideas.

Print Awareness

Print awareness is understanding that print carries meaning, that books contain letters and words, and how a book "works" — such as identifying the front and back covers and that pages are turned.

Alphabet Knowledge

Alphabet knowledge is the ability to recognize and name uppercase and lowercase letters, recognize letter symbols in print, and know that there are sounds associated with each letter.

Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of words — including rhymes, syllables, and phonemes.

Phonics and Decoding

Children's reading development is dependent on their understanding of the alphabetic principle — the idea that letters and letter patterns represent the sounds of spoken language.

Sight Words and Orthographic Mapping

Words that you can read instantly are called sight words. Orthographic mapping is the process of storing a word permanently in memory for instant retrieval — and key to effortless, accurate, and fluent reading.

Fluency

Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression. Fluency is important because it provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary plays an important part in learning to read. Beginning readers must use the words they hear orally to make sense of the words they see in print.

Spelling

Learning to spell is built on a child's understanding that words are made up of separate speech sounds (phonemes) and that letters represent those sounds.

Comprehension

Comprehension is the reason for reading. Good readers think actively as they read. They use their experiences and knowledge of the world, vocabulary, language structure, and reading strategies to make sense of the text.

Writing

A child's writing development parallels their development as a reader. Writing is a complex task that balances purpose, audience, ideas and organization with the mechanics of writing (sentence structure, word choice, spelling).

Informal Assessment

Regular informal assessments throughout the school year provides useful information that can help teachers to identify the individual strengths and weaknesses of each student.

Who's at Risk?

Some kids have a disability that makes reading difficult to learn. Others come to school without the literacy experiences they need to become readers. Some children struggle because they've received poor or inadequate reading instruction. The more risk factors a child has, the more likely it is that he or she will encounter reading problems.

What Else Matters in Teaching Reading

In addition to an excellent reading curriculum, these factors play a critical role in helping students become strong readers: a teacher's skill with classroom management, differentiated instruction, working with the students' parents, and other interventions to help struggling readers.

Featured Video: Reading Basics

Featured Resources

Launching Young Readers

Our award-winning PBS series all about reading.

Classroom Strategies

Browse our library of effective teaching strategies.

Reading 101: A Guide to Teaching Reading and Writing

Our self-paced online course for teachers.

10 Ways to Develop 9 Key Reading Skills Without Leaving Home

“We take reading for granted, yet numerous statistics show that many students, regardless of age or background, have difficulty in reading,” says Dr. Paula Tallal, world-renowned authority on speech development and founder of the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University and scientific learning.

“Scientific research shows that the ability to read is one of the most difficult skills we can master in our lives. It has also been proven that the brain can change and develop at any age and, in fact, can be trained to read.”

According to the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, the National Reading Panel, the National Institute for Literacy and other research organizations, phonemic perception , phonetics, reading fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension, as well as cognitive skills: memory, attention, sequence and sound processing play an important role in the ability to read fluently.

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Dr. Tallal shares how parents can help their school-age children develop these key skills at home:

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understand that words are made up of sequences of phonemes, the smallest units of sound that affect the meaning of words. For example, students with developed phonemic awareness skills understand that if words rhyme with each other, they can take the words apart and replace their prepositions and endings.

How to develop phonemic awareness at home: by learning songs and poems and playing games with words (for example, "How many rhymes can you think of for the word 'cat'?").

​

2. Phonetics

Phonetics is the understanding that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes (the sounds of spoken language) and graphemes (the letters and labels that represent those sounds in written language).

How to develop phonetics at home: Parents should help their children learn the alphabet by pointing out letters and saying them. Play letter games (e.g. "How many words can be made from the letters in the word 'spaghetti'?")

3. Reading fluency

Fluency is the ability to read text accurately and quickly. Experienced readers can automatically recognize words and understand their meaning.
How to improve reading fluency at home: Encourage reading aloud. Have the child read the same story over and over again. Parents should read to their children and watch how they read.

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4. Vocabulary

Vocabulary consists of the words you need to know to be a successful reader.

How to build vocabulary at home: Parents can help children build a rich vocabulary by sorting out the meanings of words together. Encourage the use of an explanatory dictionary. Teach your child how to use contextual reading cues to understand the meaning of unknown words.

5. Reading comprehension

Reading comprehension is the ability to extract meaning from a text. A good reader is aware of what he is reading.

How to work on language comprehension at home: Parents need to help their children develop healthy reading habits. To do this, help the child plan time so that he has time to read, make reading an element of encouragement, help select interesting books, and discuss with the child what he reads. Help to read meaningfully, including by answering the child's questions willingly and with interest, helping to understand something previously unknown or misunderstood.

6. Memory

Memory is the ability to store the information and ideas needed to recognize words, understand complex sentences, and remember instructions.

How to develop memory at home: Ask your child to retell stories or events that happened to him. Play memory games.

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7. Attention

Attention is the ability to focus on a task while ignoring distractions. Free reading requires constant and focused attention.

How to work on developing attention at home: To increase attention span, parents should give their children a certain amount of time to complete a task, such as doing homework or reading. Children should also learn to read or study in a quiet room free of television, radio and other distractions.

8. Information processing

In the context of reading, information processing is the ability to distinguish and associate individual speech sounds with the corresponding letter and text forms.

How to work on processing at home: Playing with sounds helps train your ear to pick up and interpret sounds clearly and accurately.

9. Ordering

Ordering skills are necessary to create and maintain a system (for example, the order of letters in a word or the order of words in a sentence).

How to work on ordering at home: Use pictures to show your child how the story progresses. If your child is learning to write, make letter cards for him and mix them up so he can make words out of the letters.

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10. Early Intervention

“The last and perhaps most important thing parents can do to help their children develop a reading brain is to recognize early when reading problems require additional intervention,” she added. Dr. Talla. “Early help is essential, especially through science-based methodologies with reading interventions targeting different areas of reading learning.

But if for some reason the need for special assistance did not immediately become clear, no matter how much time passed in the process of problematic and ineffective learning, it is never too late to help a person become an experienced reader!

Designed with the help of Dr. Paula Tallal, Fast ForWord computer programs quickly and effectively train children in all of the above skills and help them become proficient readers.
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State Autonomous Institution of Social Services of the Sverdlovsk Region "Social Rehabilitation Center for Minors of the Tugulymsky District"

Understanding a text by a child is one of the most important skills. In this article, we will answer the question "How to improve reading skills?" and let's talk about reading aloud.

In order for a child to learn to understand what they read, they must first learn to understand what they hear. A child simply will not be able to understand what he is reading about if the same information is absolutely incomprehensible to him by ear. How to help? To get started, get to grips with the skills you need.

3 skills on which the child's understanding of the text depends

Perception of information by ear words that the child reads well, understands them at first sight and does not need explanations from parents and educators. Thanks to the presence of this internal vocabulary, the child can focus on the meaning of the entire text without stopping every second. The ability to quickly decipher unknown words.

Why is it important to read to your child? The Importance of Oral Reading

Reading to children is the most effective and enjoyable way for them to improve their comprehension skills. The fact is that while a preschool child or a younger student reads poorly, they will consciously choose simple texts and easy-to-read books. Why does he need extra trouble? At the initial stage, this is not so bad, but this tendency greatly impairs the process of vocabulary development. In light books and comics, there are no new and complex, but necessary, words.

When mom, dad or teacher read aloud to children, adults have the opportunity to choose more complex material, rich in new words. No one talks about reading Scarlet Sails or Tom Sawyer to a 6-year-old child, but some of Deniska's stories (a little contest awaits you at the end of the article) may be quite acceptable. Some words will be incomprehensible the first time - you will be able to explain, besides, the child will be able to "restore" many words from the context.

The second reason why reading aloud is a more effective way to develop text comprehension is the process of listening. The child, listening, imagines what he hears, draws mental pictures and images. The brain is not busy deciphering complex phrases and constructions, as when reading, and is able to track connections and memorize new things.

Our advice is to read to your child even after he has learned to read well. New words, constructions, beautiful phrases and the experience of characters will be useful to him in life and in his studies, and the habit of reading will be the best gift.

How to read aloud correctly? A Few Tips

- As with all the habits we want to develop in our children, reading aloud to a child is recommended for a short time, but every day, because it is much more effective than reading for a long time, but rarely

. - You can read aloud to children not only before going to bed, but also during or immediately after dinner, because the children have already gathered at the table and are ready to listen to you attentively. Always carry a book or two in your bag or keep in your car to read aloud while you wait for class to start. Keep books in a visible place, such as on a coffee table or next to the TV. If one child gets to school early in the morning, read aloud to him for five to ten minutes as a reward. And of course, personal time is another great opportunity to read aloud to your child.

— Make sure that the child is physically comfortable. Otherwise, he will be constantly distracted and may even start complaining that the book is boring.

- In order to increase the concentration of the child's attention, make sure that nothing distracts him. In particular, there should not be any screens nearby, because they are the ones that distract the child most often.

- Start reading the book by examining the cover. Show your child interesting information about the book before you start reading, introduce him to the author and illustrators. Read the abstract and discuss what this book might be about. Talk about what each of you may already know about this book. - If there are drawings or photographs in the book, flip through the book and study them all, trying to extract as much information as possible. As a rule, after this, the child has a desire to read this book.

What if the child does not want to listen?

The child may feel uncomfortable, really uninteresting, or the culture of reading is still quite weak. We will discuss below what to do in such a situation.

some simple advice for parents whose children don't want to listen

  • Read with expression. For this, one does not need to have theatrical talent or speak in roles, changing the tone of voice, but it is desirable to single out at least a word in a sentence.
  • If the child comments on what he read, praise him for the most interesting moments. Do not try to bribe a child: if we read a little - I will buy you a chocolate bar, so he will decide that suffering because of reading is normal behavior and deserves a response.
  • Pictures again: show pictures each time they describe the scene you are currently reading.
  • Use the "missing word" technique - pause before saying a word that the child can guess. Let him try to finish the phrase for his mother, who suddenly thought. And be sure to praise!
  • Before you start reading, remember our tips about the cover and the author — try to predict what will happen in the book, discuss what new things you can learn from it.
  • Discuss it with your child after each section of a large book or story. Ask questions.
  • If the child is small and you read the same book every time, ask the same questions: this way the child will remember and answer with pleasure.
  • If a preschooler doesn't pay attention to you while you're reading, don't ask him questions. Simplify the text a) if it contains incomprehensible vocabulary b) if you can break a long sentence into several short ones c) if you can repeat significant phrases or thoughts d) if you can safely throw away entire paragraphs for meaning.
  • Set a positive example: no tattered or torn books or disrespectful treatment. Read in front of the child when he is busy with his own affairs (you can even read to yourself, just demonstrating that it is interesting and important).

Why is it important to ask questions during oral reading?

Research has shown that listening is not enough to improve understanding of the text and practice this skill. Although oral reading awakens the imagination, and activates memory, and allows the child to be included in the process. However, the love of reading, the formation of vocabulary and reference stocks, communication skills and understanding can be trained with the help of questions.

When we ask children to explain something to us, predict, express their opinion, or simply recall a detail that we, careless adults, omitted - they are involved in the process, and comprehension skills improve significantly, because you need to:

- remember the details ; - draw conclusions;

- imagine the plot;

- dream up;

- sometimes even, like Sherlock Holmes, set the motive!

It is important to note that you will have to ask the children to answer the questions in full sentences: this is how the child will also learn to communicate competently and use more complex constructions in speech. In addition, the need to answer questions in more detail will teach him to listen carefully. Preschoolers and elementary schoolers will soon take pride in the fact that they can talk "like adults", speak beautifully and receive praise.

Questions of the first type. Checking details

- Who brought the letter to Harry Potter?

— What was the kitten Woof afraid of?

- What was Uncle Styopa's job?

- Who was sitting under the hat in the story "The Living Hat"?

— What has the ugly duckling become?

Questions of the second type.

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