Reading Comprehension [Definition]:

Reading comprehension is the ability to read text, process it and understand its meaning. An individual's ability to comprehend text is influenced by their traits and skills, one of which is the ability to make inferences. If word recognition is difficult, students use too much of their processing capacity to read individual words, which interferes with their ability to comprehend what is read.

Comprehension strategies :

1. Monitor comprehension -
   This tells the student what he has understood and what he has not.

   Monitoring comprehension helps students in following ways :

•  Being aware of what student understands.
•  Indicate what he has not understood.

2. ”Thinking about thinking” -

       This in other words is also called as meta cognition.

       This strategy helps in following ways :

• Indicate where difficulty occurs.
• Indicate what difficulty is.
• Rephrase the difficult sentence or passage in their own words.
• Reread the passage to understand more.
• Peek into passage for data that might resolve your difficulty.

3. Semantic and graphical organizers -

A graphic organizer, also known as knowledge map, concept map, story map, cognitive organizer, advance organizer, or concept diagram, is a communication tool that uses visual symbols to express knowledge, concepts, thoughts, or ideas, and the relationships between them.

Some good examples for graphic organizers are :

1. Venn diagrams
2. Storyboard/Chain of Events
3. Story Map
4. Cause/Effect

4. Question answering -

    This can help because it can  :

•  Help student understand the motive of reading the passage.
•  Give emphasis on what they are going to learn.
•  Assist students to think in active fashion as they read.
•  Endorse students to monitor their comprehension.
•  Assist students for reviewing the content and for their inferences .

5. Question generation -
 

Students learn if they are able to grasp the concept and what they are reading.
They learn to ask themselves questions that require thinking about more than one part of information  and combine this information.