Seven Comprehension Strategies

The goal of reading instruction is to develop strategic readers. These seven basic reading comprehension strategies needed by all successful readers are currently taught from kindergarten through eighth grade:

Make Connections: Readers make connections between what they read and what they’ve experienced.

Determine Importance: Readers recognize what’s important or the main ideas while excluding the unimportant.

Ask Questions: Readers ask questions to guide their reading and to clarify any confusion.

Visualize: Readers see “the movie in their head” and can picture what they read.

Make Inferences: Readers combine their background knowledge with clues from the text to make inferences.

Synthesize: Readers put ideas together to form new knowledge from text.

Repair Comprehension: Readers select “fix-up” strategies to help clear up confusion as they read.