How are the Reading Strategies useful?

The Reading Strategies will help you better understand what you read. They will also improve your ability to explain text to yourself.

Definitions of the Reading Strategies

Comprehension Monitoring:

Being aware of how well you understand what you are reading.

Continuously being aware of whether one is understanding content, and if not, in what way one is having problems is the foundation of active reading. Effective comprehension monitoring facilitates application of adequate problem solving behaviors during the reading process to repair comprehension problems, and this in turn, helps readers comprehend the text content more effectively.

Paraphrasing:

Stating the sentences in your own words.

Paraphrasing requires a reader to try to state the sentence content in their own words. This process helps the reader closely monitor their comprehension of the sentence. Paraphrasing also helps the reader activate relevant knowledge because readers need to search for words and phrases that are related but different from the ones in the sentence. This activation often leads readers to ease into using more advanced strategies such as elaboration and bridging. Finally, paraphrasing helps readers remember the information better because the information is associated with words and phrases more familiar to the readers.

Prediction:

Predicting what will come next in the text.

Skilled readers engage in active reading in a sense that they try to constantly figure out what direction the story or discussion in the text is developing while reading. Such an attitude to continuously predict upcoming text content from the current section enhances integration of the text content to the knowledge activated by the prediction. In addition, trying to predict the upcoming text content facilitates more close comprehension monitoring because readers compare the actual text content with the prediction.

Elaboration:

Linking information in the sentence to information you already know.

Texts are almost never complete descriptions of the events or scenes they describe. Thus, comprehending text content requires a certain degree of elaboration on the text content based on one's knowledge. Elaboration helps readers relate the text content with what one already knows, thus making the text content fully integrated as part of one's existing knowledge structure.

Bridging:

Linking different parts of a text together.

Accurate understanding of the overall text meaning requires readers to constantly link multiple sentences in a coherent way. One important way in which sentences in a text are related is causal relation. Identifying and understanding sentence(s) in a previous section of the text which contain the cause of the event described in the current sentence is important for bridging and forming a coherent understanding of overall text content. Hence readers are encouraged to relate the sentences to one another.

Example of Self-Explanation

Polluted rain results from large amounts of sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides combining with rainwater.

Self-Explanation:

This sentence is saying that some rain is polluted. It also says that pollution comes from things called sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides. The sulfur and nitrogen oxides are chemicals that must come from things like cars and factories.

{The part of the Self-Explanation that is in black color is Paraphrasing. The part of the Self-Explanation that is in Blue is Elaboration.}

Examples of each Reading Strategy

Example for Comprehension Monitoring

A substance is either an element or a compound.

Self-Explanation:

I don't know what an element is. So, I have to pay more attention to anything that helps me understand what an element is.

Example for Paraphrasing:

A hurricane hitting land is a victim of multiple processes.

Self-Explanation:

So, this is saying that a hurricane that goes on land is affected by a number of things, or processes.

Example for Prediction:

There are many different types of bones.

Self-Explanation:

I think it's about human bones. It's going to talk about the different bones in different parts of the body.

Example for Elaboration:

The food chain is the sequence in which the organisms eat one another.

Self Explanation:

This means that the food chain describes the order in which living things eat each other. So, plants are eaten by insects, and insects are eaten by birds.

Example for Bridging:

The size and shape of human bones are tied to the bones’ function. The long bones of your arms and legs make up one group of bones.

Self Explanation:

Arm and leg bones have the same shape because they have the same function.