Several students find reading comprehension difficult. It’s not a standalone skill and can’t be obtained without practice or repetition. Consequently, teachers continue their quest to find ways to help students deal with reading difficulties.

Teacher Read-Aloud Model

This method employs the teacher’s voice to teach students diverse elements of reading. Such elements include learning to decode punctuation and the use of proper tone, pitch, and inflection for different characters and moods. Using differentiated reading with various text structures and leveled readings, students learn to decode contextual meanings of words and phrases, create connections with the text, understand different story-telling techniques and the reason behind different writing styles.

Read-aloud with various texts helps students view stories in diverse formats and understand them from different angles with active use of their skills, unlike partaking in rote activities. Due to the teacher’s active engagement, students are more prone to engage in conversation and ask questions to improve their understanding of the story and its elements.

Think-Aloud Model

This model allows students to think as they read. This teaches them about the reading process and that understanding an idea could need more than one reading. While the teacher reads to the class, students reread sentences slowly to grasp concepts, find context clues, and understand the information presented. By letting them ask questions, teachers give them the chance to evaluate their level of understanding of the story.

High 5 Model

This model breaks down reading into different steps – before, during, and after. The steps happen in a series:

• Accessing Prior Knowledge: This step encourages students to access their prior knowledge to relate to the reading even before they see or begin with the content. Their prior knowledge can be derived from other school subjects, personal experiences, and consist of emotions about particular topics. Students may also recognize that their earlier understanding of a subject was wrong or incomplete when accessing prior knowledge. Such awareness offers them the chance to rebuild or change their understanding of a subject.
• Questioning: Asking questions about concepts allows students to understand new material or use existing knowledge to connect it with new comprehensions. Questioning lets them go deep into a topic, engage better with the reading text, and dissect every element for complete understanding, including analyzing the use of different themes, integration of primary sources, and use of figurative language.
• Analyzing Text Structure: This teaches students to follow patterns and decode the meaning of different words and phrases contextually. For example, the use of an adage like “killing two birds with one stone” could be literal or figurative depending on the text structure’s form. In a survivalist guide, the meaning could be literal, while in a fictional text, this would refer to achieving two goals with a solitary action. Inability to decode the diverse text structures could mean the student misinterpreting the information.
• Visualization: It’s not limited to sheer images. Visualization can include picturing a cause and effect chart, a concept map, or associations between characters. Using visualization, readers can create their own idea of what the story is trying to convey, irrespective of whether its content is imaginary or realistic. Visualization can also be abstract or concrete based on the type of work. In either case, accessing the ability to visualize ideas in the form of images or diagrams helps create a better understanding of the text.
• Summarizing: This helps students focus on relevant main ideas while leaving out the redundant details of a story. Summaries can be visual presentations, student-created projects, video recordings, or written explanations to showcase the purpose of reading. To summarize a story or text, a student needs to understand well what happened in the reading and the elements that helped express the core messages and themes.

Conclusion

Each model offers the students different strategies and tools to help them understand diverse texts. However, not all strategies will work for everyone. Some students will benefit from a particular strategy, while others may find a blend of each strategy working for them just as well. Zeroing in on the appropriate strategy (or strategies) will take time. But once a student finds it, he will continue using the method in the future, thus improving his skills even further.