Reading Comprehension and Skilled Reading
Help all students become skilled readers by teaching them the reading comprehension skills they need to successfully transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”
Help all students become skilled readers by teaching them the reading comprehension skills they need to successfully transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”
What is a skilled reader?
Skilled readers have achieved a level of reading comprehension that goes beyond simply viewing or reciting the explicit words on a page. They’re able to understand a text’s deeper meaning.
As texts become more complex, readers must become strategic in implementing the literacy skills they learn to make meaning from what they read. Background and content knowledge become increasingly necessary as readers must rely on what they already know to identify important ideas and strive to make logical connections between them.
These skills allow students to progress through grade-level standards as texts become a main source of information for learning in school, typically in third grade. If students can’t reach this milestone, they risk falling behind.
What reading comprehension skills are required to become a skilled reader?
The simple view of reading, developed by Gough and Tunmer in the 1980s, defines reading comprehension as:
To break it down even more, they define those components as:
Word recognition: Decoding or identifying written words.
Language comprehension: Understanding spoken and written language.
Since then, newer frameworks—based on the science of reading, like Scarborough’s reading rope or the active view of reading—have provided more details on the component skills that make up each of those categories.
Learning to read
Before students can understand and make meaning from a text, they must be able to read the words on the page accurately and fluently.
“Learning to read” in school often begins in kindergarten, where word recognition is the major focus of early literacy development. To be able to recognize words, students must develop:
Phonological awareness: Identifying and manipulating the sounds of spoken language.
Decoding skills: Sounding out unfamiliar words.
Sight recognition: Identifying common words that become familiar through repeated practice.
Throughout early elementary school, students continue to work toward mastering word recognition skills and becoming more fluent readers.
Reading to learn
By third grade, text becomes a main source of information for learning in school and signals that students have entered the “reading to learn” phase.
According to the science of reading, once they cross this threshold, typically developing readers can focus more of their time and attention on advanced skills that support reading comprehension.
But this doesn’t mean they stop learning how to read. They must continue developing their literacy skills and building content knowledge to understand more advanced texts as they progress through school. Students do this by learning and using language comprehension skills like:
Language structures: Learning how the order of words in sentences creates meaning.
Background knowledge: Connecting personal experiences, world events, and other texts or media to what you’re reading.
Vocabulary: Learning new words and their meanings, and how to use them contextually when speaking and writing.
Literacy knowledge: Discovering how to recognize and use print concepts and literary conventions like genres and text features.
Verbal reasoning: Using the other language comprehension skills to analyze and draw conclusions about what you're reading.
Challenges of building skilled readers in the classroom
When K-12 teachers and schools lack high-quality curricular materials and research-based instructional approaches, it’s more difficult to teach students the language comprehension skills they need to become skilled readers. Some of these challenges include:
Gaps in core materials
Core programs provide materials that fully address the curricular standards for a grade and subject area. However, they often don’t provide the in-depth coverage necessary for students to understand the concepts underlying those standards.
These core materials incorrectly assume that students have the content knowledge to learn about complex topics and omit what the publishers see as “extraneous information.” With school districts adopting new curricula on an average of every 5 to 10 years, the core materials may contain outdated viewpoints and lack information on current events.
Print-only core materials can’t provide multimedia content that helps create context around a topic. Interactive activities, videos, and audio content enrich the learning experience and help students make stronger connections to the material they’re learning.
Core programs may also lack diverse, relevant materials that provide a variety of perspectives on topics and concepts. They fail to represent all students, which makes it harder to increase engagement and motivate students to learn.
Both reading and learning rely on making connections to existing knowledge. Students must have access to materials that build on their lived experiences and introduce them to new experiences and information.
As a result of these challenges, teachers spend between 7 and 12 hours per week creating or searching for supplemental—oftentimes unvetted or not easily accessible—resources to fill the gaps.
Lack of differentiation supports
One-size-fits-all instruction doesn’t work for most students. Instruction is most effective when it builds on students’ strengths and targets their needs. Unfortunately, educators don’t have time to create 20+ personalized lessons per class to meet each student where they are. They don’t know the background knowledge each student brings to the class or all the words in their vocabulary.
Teachers need differentiated supports to make it easy to adapt instruction in the moment and target each student’s language comprehension skills. Core programs typically lack differentiated materials, once again, forcing teachers to look for supplemental content to fill the gaps.
Teachers report that finding differentiated materials is challenging and time-consuming. Without them, students in the same class often have to read different texts independently or in small groups rather than participating in whole-class instruction and experiencing grade-level content in their lessons.
Discover 17 fun ways to teach reading comprehension in a differentiated classroom
Developing reading comprehension in the classroom with Newsela
Newsela ELA helps fill gaps in students’ literacy and content knowledge by providing diverse, high-interest content with powerful scaffolding tools. Newsela Social Studies and Newsela Science also support the development of reading comprehension and analysis skills while teaching discipline-specific information. All of our products provide frequent opportunities for formative assessment that offer insights to guide targeted instructional decision-making and differentiation.
Teach reading comprehension in daily lessons and assessments
With Newsela’s products, you can provide explicit instruction and modeling in standards-based skills and create assignments that include scaffolds and activities to facilitate student practice like:
Leveling: Differentiate instruction with texts at five reading levels and teacher controls to set the level for students to target decoding and sight recognition. Lock the level to give students practice with grade-level or appropriately challenging texts, or choose the Newsela recommended level for independent reading.
Annotations: Facilitate active, engaged reading practice with shareable annotations to highlight elements of phonological awareness or sight words for students.
Read aloud mode: Give students the option to practice word recognition skills by playing, pausing, and rewinding audio versions of texts.
Curriculum complements: Use our collections of texts and multimedia resources that map directly to popular curricular materials to target background knowledge and provide a content-rich supplement to the concepts taught in curricular frameworks across ELA, science, and social studies.
Quizzes: Pose multiple-choice questions, also written at five reading levels, relevant to language comprehension skills like text connections, text structures, and the author’s craft.
Checks for understanding: Embed questions within the text that allow students to slow down and make sure they understand what they’ve read, reflect on new vocabulary, or activate their background knowledge before moving forward in a text.
Power Words: Assess students’ understanding of high-utility Tier II vocabulary words in Newsela content.
Write prompts: Give students opportunities to reflect upon and synthesize learning after reading a text or reviewing multimedia content and apply what they know about language structures and literacy knowledge.
Lesson Sparks: Offer teachers instructional guidance for implementing language comprehension skills like background knowledge, vocabulary, and verbal reasoning using Newsela content.
Comprehensive reporting: Get real-time updated data from formative assessments to monitor student reading behavior and review student performance on assessments.
How school districts leverage content-rich literacy instruction for reading comprehension with Newsela
How Garland ISD bridged the gap between literacy instruction and other subjects with Newsela ELA
Garland ISD in Texas needed high-quality resources that allowed students to practice literacy skills, build background knowledge, and drive comprehension. The elementary team used Newsela ELA’s library of over 15,000 articles to support literacy instruction across the district. The content aligned to Garland’s state standards and curated curriculum complements made it easy for literacy coordinators to map resources to teachers’ scope and sequence.
How Benjamin Banneker Academy drove reading comprehension through literacy skills practice with Newsela ELA
Benjamin Banneker Academy in New Jersey wanted a better way to differentiate instruction for K-8 students while practicing literacy skills. Teachers used results from the bi-weekly student quizzes on Newsela ELA to share insights across classrooms and provide real-time support, which led to typical-to-high reading growth from students who participated.
Literacy gains from weekly Newsela ELA use: A quasi-experimental evaluation of content-rich instruction
Dexter Community Schools in Michigan used regular formative assessments to drive reading outcomes. An ESSA Tier II study examined the literacy skill growth of elementary students in the district. Researchers compared students who used Newsela ELA texts and quizzes weekly to a control group and found that fourth-grade Newsela users achieved about three additional months of literacy skill growth compared to their non-Newsela peers. Newsela classes also read 44% more nonfiction texts than comparison classes.
Reading comprehension 101
Need a refresher on some of the key topics surrounding reading comprehension? Browse the questions below to get the answers you need:
What is reading comprehension?
Reading comprehension happens when students read a text, internalize it, and understand the meaning of what they read. It’s the ultimate goal of reading
Read more about how to teach reading comprehension to students
Why is reading comprehension important?
To succeed in any school subject, students need the foundation of being able to read words on a page and understand what they mean. That skill doesn’t go dormant when they graduate either. Reading is all around us, every day. Without the foundation of “learning to read” and then the “transition to reading to learn,” students would be at a disadvantage in school and when they enter post-secondary education and the workforce.
What strategies make teaching reading comprehension effective?
There are certain things educators can do to make reading comprehension instruction as effective as possible. These strategies include:
Relying on explicit instruction and demonstration
Chunking and sequencing skills logically
Focusing on practice and application
Building knowledge, not just skills
Learn more about strategies teachers can use to make reading comprehensive stick for students.
What reading comprehension strategies work better for different grade bands?
Reading comprehension strategies build on each other. It’s helpful to know which strategies are most effective for each grade band so you can prioritize how and when to teach and reinforce them as students progress through school. The best strategies for each grade band include:
Early elementary (Grades K-2)
Answering questions
Asking questions
Making predictions
Retelling stories
Mid- and upper-elementary (Grades 3-5)
Practicing visualization
Activating prior knowledge
Building background knowledge
Summarizing
Middle school (Grades 6-8)
Making inferences
Previewing texts
Practicing self-monitoring comprehension
Determining key details in a text
High school (Grades 9-12)
Asking questions
Building background knowledge
Practicing self-monitoring comprehension
Summarizing or retelling
Synthesizing information
Learn more about teaching and reinforcing reading comprehension for each grade band
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