Here's a breakdown of its purpose:
1. Facilitate Meaning-Making:
- Go beyond literal understanding: Comprehension strategies help readers move beyond simply identifying words to constructing a deeper, nuanced understanding of the text's content.
- Active Engagement: They encourage readers to be active participants in the reading process, not just passive recipients of information.
2. Enhance Learning:
- Improve reading comprehension: By using these strategies, readers become more efficient and effective at extracting key information and understanding complex ideas.
- Strengthen critical thinking: Comprehending text involves analyzing, evaluating, and interpreting information, all of which contribute to the development of critical thinking skills.
- Foster lifelong learning: Effective comprehension strategies provide a framework for understanding various types of texts throughout life, from academic papers to news articles to fictional narratives.
3. Support Different Types of Readers:
- Struggling readers: These strategies provide scaffolding and support to make reading more accessible and meaningful.
- Advanced readers: These strategies offer tools for deeper analysis, critical thinking, and exploration of complex ideas.
Examples of Comprehension Strategies:
* Previewing and predicting: Actively engaging with the text before reading by looking at headings, subheadings, pictures, etc.
* Making connections: Relating the text to prior knowledge, personal experiences, or other texts.
* Asking questions: Formulating questions before, during, and after reading to guide comprehension and clarify meaning.
* Visualizing: Creating mental images of the text to enhance understanding and memory.
* Summarizing and retelling: Condensing the main ideas of the text in one's own words to check for comprehension.
Overall, comprehension strategies are crucial for anyone who wants to become a confident and skilled reader. They empower readers to understand and engage with the vast amount of text they encounter in their daily lives.