How to Improve Your Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension is an important skill. Understanding what you read is a crucial part of learning. Yet, comprehending what you read is not always the easiest task. If you find that you don’t always grasp what you’ve just read, or you find that you consistently have to back-track and read information twice, you may find it valuable to work on improving your reading comprehension. Here are some helpful techniques that can help you do just that!
How do you know if your reading comprehension is good?
Reading comprehension refers to being able to understand what you’re reading. Comprehending is not the same as recall. Some people are very good at recalling facts and information that they’ve read. Comprehension does require some ability to recall information, but it entails taking understanding a big step further. Really comprehending is the ability to pick up information but also to make your own inferences. If you’re a strong comprehender, you are able to connect the dots. People who are easily able to comprehend what they read can not only recall information that they’ve just read, but they can analyze the information to answer what are referred to as “Higher Order Thinking Questions.”
Higher order thinking questions are open-ended questions whose answers are not directly laid out in the text. They can come in many forms, and they are utilized to reinforce reading comprehension. For instance, things like “How do you know that the young girl is angry?” or “What do you think the grandmother’s brooch represent?” are examples of HOTS questions. To answer these, you reflect on what you’ve read and you think more deeply than just the words on the page. You know the girl is angry because in the story she scowls and stomps her feet when her mother doesn’t let her get an ice cream treat at the store. The story never explicitly says that the girl is angry — that is something you deduce using your own comprehension skills. Similarly, you are able to determine that the grandmother’s hat represents her need to be seen as high-status. Even when the family has no money left and has to sell their house, the grandmother insists on wearing her best clothes every single day. Without being told, you know that the grandmother cherishes her ego and how people view her. For this reason, she wears her brooch as a way to try to uphold her diminishing status.
If you’ve ever taken a literary analysis class this should seem pretty familiar. This is a major part of many 11th and 12th grade English classes. You will read novels as a class and then spend entire class periods talking about what the stories actually mean. You discuss symbolism and hidden messages. You are effectively working on comprehending these specific stories, connecting the dots as you go. This is what leads to great reading comprehension, and the more you practice it, the easier and more natural it will become.
Why bother to improve your reading comprehension?
No matter what phase of your life you are in, there will always be a benefit to becoming a better reader. For children in the early years of school, understanding what they read from an early age will help propel them forward and make academics easier for them for years to come. For high schoolers preparing to head off to college, this is a great time to polish your reading comprehension skills. In college you will read more words than you’ve maybe read in your entire life so far. College-level coursework will be a heck of a lot easier to work through if you understand it the first time you’ve read it. And if you’re an established adult, and you have no plan to go back to school, well, bettering your reading comprehension is a good idea for you, too. Being better able to understand written information transfers over into virtually any field of work, and, who knows, you just might fend up loving reading and take it up as a hobby!
Techniques for improving your reading comprehension
No matter your reading comprehension starting point, you can always work on bettering your ability to understand information. Here are some techniques you can try to use to better understand while you read:
Make movies in your head while you read. If there is one thing that you can do to help you better understand and remember ANYTHING that you read, it’s to convert that written text into a mental picture that you play along in your head like a movie you are watching in realtime. Pay close attention to sensory details throughout anything you’re reading. Notice the descriptions that the author gives about different settings, the weather, people’s clothing. Do they mention specific colors? Specific smells? Take all of that information and turn it into your own personal little movie that runs in your head while you read. If you can get in the habit of creating mental imagery while you read, your overall reading comprehension abilities will improve dramatically.
Tap into your own curiosity. As you read, take frequent pauses to ask yourself questions. Based on what you’ve read so far, consider what you think might happen next. Question the motives of the characters - why did the mother decide to skip work? Why did the author include the information about the letter on the nightstand? What do I think the entire two sentences about the pancake breakfast is going to foreshadow? You know that feeling you get when you watch a movie or you read a book and you suddenly figure out how everything is connected? You know exactly how it’s all going to come together and make sense. Finally! That’s a fun feeling. Chase that feeling while you read. Even when you’re on page 3, stop and try to determine where the road is going. This type of attention will help you stay engaged with the text.
Write summaries about what you read. If you find you constantly zone out while you read, try to break your reading into smaller pieces. Take one paragraph or one page at a time, and take breaks in between each to write out a short summary of the paragraph or the page. Don’t focus so much on details - instead ask yourself what the main idea was. Why did the author need to include that specific paragraph? What role did it play? Taking these breaks will train your brain to not only mindlessly read but to think on a deeper level and actively question and analyze what you’re reading as you go.
Read MORE. Read A LOT. Read as much as you can! You can’t become a great reader without doing a lot of reading. The more you read, the better your comprehension will become. And we think that the better your reading comprehension, the more likely that you will learn to LOVE to read (if you don’t already).
Being a strong reader means more than just being able to make out the words and sentences on a page. If you’re not able to absorb and understand the messages and information in the text, what is the point of even reading it? Many people struggle with reading comprehension - in fact, this is something that can slip through the cracks during early schooling years. Learning to read tends to focus on being literate - being able to actually read words. However, literacy is meant to be twofold: you have to be able to decipher the words, but you also have to be able to comprehend the meaning of them.
Once you’ve mastered your reading comprehension, you can still become a more skilled reader. One way to do this is to master the craft of speed-reading.
Looking for more focused ACT reading guidance? Check out our 7-Part Complete ACT Reading Suite!
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