Plenty of research shows that teaching comprehension strategies as part of a brief, targeted sequence of instruction has a positive impact on pupils’ reading comprehension. However, it is all too easy to forget the importance of the breadth of knowledge required for a reader to use these strategies effectively.
Professor Dan Willingham suggests that teaching our pupils strategies like summarisation, clarification and activating prior knowledge ‘undeniably works’. However, he stresses that an overemphasis of comprehension strategies can lead us to spend whole terms drilling pupils on how to summarise texts they don’t understand, or ask inferential questions without teaching the vocabulary, structures, and background knowledge they need to access the text.
Instead, he suggests that our time is far better spent on ‘generative vocabulary instruction, deep content exploration, and opportunities for reading across genres and content areas.’
Reading comprehension: Strategies for building background knowledge
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