Reading is a complex, multifaceted process, and reciprocal teaching is designed to focus on only four of the most important strategies that good readers use to comprehend text (i.e., predict, question, clarify, summarize).

Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension

1. Monitoring comprehension. Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not.
2. Metacognition.
3. Graphic and semantic organizers.
4. Answering questions.
5. Generating questions.
6. Recognizing story structure.
7. Summarizing.

Monitoring comprehension is a process in which students determine whether they understand what they are reading. If they realize that they cannot articulate the main idea of the passage, they can take steps to repair their comprehension before continuing to read.

Here are six essential skills needed for reading comprehension , and tips on what can help kids improve this skill.

• Decoding. Decoding is a vital step in the reading process.
• Fluency.
• Vocabulary.
• Sentence construction and cohesion.
• Reasoning and background knowledge.
• Working memory and attention.

Reading is broken down into five main areas: ​phonemic awareness​, ​phonics​, ​fluency​, ​vocabulary​, and ​comprehension​.

The Big 5 are: Background Knowledge; Oral Language and Vocabulary; Book Knowledge and Print Concepts; Alphabet Knowledge and Early Writing; and Phonological Awareness. The Big 5 should be part of teaching every day because communication, language, and literacy are the foundation for children’s learning.

The five major concepts are Phonemic Awareness, Phonics Instruction, Fluency Instruction, Comprehension, and Vocabulary Instruction.

Phonological awareness involves a group of skills. One is called phonemic awareness. This skill is about tuning in to individual sounds in a word, or phonemes. It lets people break apart a word into the sounds that make it up, and blend single sounds into words.

Methods of Assessing Reading Comprehension One method is to use a formal assessment, like the example above, with reading passages followed by questions about the passage. Another method is to use informal assessments. Ask students to tell you about what they read or retell the story or event in their own words.

Fundamental Skills Necessary for Proficient Phonologic Processing:

• Phonemic Awareness.
• Knowledge of Complete Phonetic Code.
• Directional Tracking.
• Blending.
• Attention to Detail.
• Skill in handling multisyllable words.
• Fluency.

Practice, practice, practice.

1. As with anything else, developing reading skills takes work. Set aside time to read every day.
2. Take a book with you on a morning bus or train commute, or read on your lunch break.
3. Read the words out loud.
4. Visualize the story, pay attention to the introduction of characters and places.

Skimming reading.

The different types of reading skills are:

• Decoding. Decoding is the ability to sound out words children have heard before but haven’t seen written out.
• Phonics.
• Vocabulary.
• Fluency.
• Sentence Construction & Cohesion.
• Reading Comprehension.
• Reasoning & Background Knowledge.
• Working Memory & Attention.

7 Reading Techniques or Styles are the following:

• Scanning.
• Skimming.
• Active Reading.
• Detailed.
• Speed.
• Structure-Proposition-Evaluation.
• Survey-Question-Read-Recite-Review.