Nearly a half century ago, a landmark study showed that teachers weren’t explicitly teaching reading comprehension. Once children learned how to read words, no one taught them how to make sense of the sentences and paragraphs. Some kids naturally got it. Some didn’t.
Since then, reading researchers have come up with many ideas to foster comprehension. Educators continue to debate how much to emphasize some ideas over others. Although the research on reading comprehension continues, there’s relatively good evidence for a collection of teaching approaches, from building vocabulary and background knowledge to leading classroom discussions and encouraging children to check for understanding as they read.
