Your child can read every word on the page and still have no idea what happened in the story. That gap is what reading comprehension is, and closing it is mostly a matter of talking about books with your child.
If you’re wondering how to improve reading comprehension, start by asking your child what they've just read and getting them to tell you the story back in their own words. Our literacy team works with a lot of children who can read every word on the page and still miss the story.
What Reading Comprehension Means
A few things have to come together before your child understands the meaning of what they read. Your child needs to know what the words mean, follow the sentence as a whole, link what’s on the page to what they already know about the world, and get through the words themselves without it taking all their effort.
Children who know more word meanings tend to understand more of what they read, and much of that advantage works through their ability to fill in what the text leaves out (Daugaard, Cain, & Elbro, 2017).
For example, a child who’s never seen snow will struggle with a story set in winter, however well they read, because they’ve got nothing to picture. It’s also why comprehension keeps developing for years after the reading skills themselves are in place. In one study, what students already knew about a subject predicted how much they remembered from a passage better than their reading ability did (Recht & Leslie, 1988).
So listen for how your child talks about a book. A child who explains what happened in their own words has understood it, and a child who repeats the sentences back word for word often hasn’t. If they’re struggling to fully grasp what they’re reading, we recommend focusing your attention on dedicated reading comprehension strategies.
Six Reading Comprehension Strategies to Practice
Strong readers predict, question, picture, check themselves, fill in gaps, and retell, usually without realizing they’re doing it. You can teach your child all six of these skills just by talking with them about the book in front of you:
- Ask what happens next. Stop before you turn the page and let your child guess. Guessing ahead gets them thinking about where the story is going, which teaches them to be an active reader rather than a passive one.
- Wonder out loud. Say “I wonder why she did that” and wait. Your child learns to question the text by hearing you do it first.
- Ask what they can picture. What does the house look like in their head? Making a picture of what they’re reading helps your child hold onto it.
- Teach them to notice when they’re lost. Tell your child that going back and rereading a confusing bit is what good readers do, not a sign they’ve failed.
- Ask about what isn’t written down. Where were they? How did they get there? Children who struggle with comprehension often don’t make those links on their own, and prompting them to go back and look improves their answers (Cain & Oakhill, 1999).
How to Make Reading at Home Easier
Asking good questions works better when your child isn’t fighting the words themselves. Two habits make that easier, and both still work as your child gets older.
The first is rereading favorites. Even that one you could recite in your sleep by now. It’s one of the best ways to help your child with reading comprehension (Therrien, 2004). If your child knows which words are coming, they can devote more attention to understanding their meaning. An older student gets the same benefit from a second pass through a chapter they’ve already read once (Therrien, 2004).
The second is echo reading, which is fantastic for a child who reads word by word or takes one look at a full page and stalls. You read a sentence out loud, using the voice you’d use if you were just having a conversation. Your child hears how it’s meant to sound. Then they say it back to you, and then they can try the next sentence on their own with more confidence.
Older students can do this for themselves by reading a tricky paragraph out loud rather than in their head.
Fifteen to twenty minutes a day is a good aim at any age, and it doesn’t have to be in one sitting. Ten minutes after school and ten at bedtime works just as well. And on a day when you only manage ten total, that still counts.
How to Improve Reading Comprehension for Older Students
The tough part with an older student is that you’re not there. They’re reading a history chapter at their desk with nobody to ask what a word means, so the job shifts from reading together to handing over the strategies they’ll use alone (Mol & Bus, 2011).
Three things help most at this age:
- Get them talking about what they’re reading for school. Ask what their book is about at dinner, or what they made of the chapter they just read. It’s the same conversation you had over picture books, and it still shows you what they're taking in.
- Teach the one-sentence summary. After each section of a textbook, your child says what it was about in a single sentence. If they can’t, they haven’t understood it, and that’s the signal to read it again before moving on.
- Help them with the vocabulary they’ll meet in class. Older students hit words like “evaluate” and “analyze” in almost every subject (Nagy & Townsend, 2012). Going over those words before an exam does more than any amount of rereading.
What to Do if Your Child Is Still Struggling
Everything above assumes your child can get through the words on the page without much of a fight. Questioning and retelling will only go so far, though.
If reading still feels like a daily battle, there could be something else going on. Look into the signs that a child is struggling with reading, and then book an evaluation with a speech-language pathologist, who can test for spoken language disorders that might affect reading ability. Don’t wait - evaluate.
There's plenty you can do to support your child at home. Resources like our Better Letters or dyslexia reading tools can be helpful for children with more specific needs.
Frequently asked questions
My child hates being asked questions about what they’ve read. What now?
Drop the questions for a bit and do the talking yourself. Tell them what you thought of the ending, or which character drove you up the wall. Give your child something to react to and you’ll often end up having the conversation anyway.
Does listening to an audiobook count?
For comprehension, absolutely. Your child still has to follow the plot, keep track of who’s who, and work out what people really mean. They won’t be practicing reading the words themselves, but for a child who finds those hard and loves a good story, an audiobook is a brilliant way in.
How do I know if my child’s reading comprehension is improving?
Listen to how they retell a book over the course of a term. Early on, you’ll get a breathless list of everything that happened, in no particular order. Later, you’ll hear the events in the order they actually happened, and your child will start explaining why each one led to the next. That’s the shift to listen for.
Should my child only read books at their reading level?
Leveled books are useful when your child is reading on their own. But when you’re the one reading aloud, you can go well above what they could manage themselves. That way, they encounter the longer sentences and more interesting words with you right there to explain anything that puzzles them.
Sources:
- Cain, K., & Oakhill, J. V. (1999). Inference-making ability and its relation to comprehension failure in young children. Reading and Writing, 11(5-6), 489 to 503. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008084120205
- Daugaard, H. T., Cain, K., & Elbro, C. (2017). From words to text: Inference making mediates the role of vocabulary in children’s reading comprehension. Reading and Writing, 30(8), 1773 to 1788. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9752-2
- Mol, S. E., & Bus, A. G. (2011). To read or not to read: A meta-analysis of print exposure from infancy to early adulthood. Psychological Bulletin, 137(2), 267 to 296. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021890
- Nagy, W., & Townsend, D. (2012). Words as tools: Learning academic vocabulary as language acquisition. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(1), 91 to 108. https://doi.org/10.1002/RRQ.011
- National Reading Panel. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/product/64
- Recht, D. R., & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers’ memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16 to 20. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.80.1.16
- Rosenshine, B., Meister, C., & Chapman, S. (1996). Teaching students to generate questions: A review of the intervention studies. Review of Educational Research, 66(2), 181 to 221. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543066002181
- Shanahan, T., Callison, K., Carriere, C., Duke, N. K., Pearson, P. D., Schatschneider, C., & Torgesen, J. (2010). Improving reading comprehension in kindergarten through 3rd grade: A practice guide (NCEE 2010-4038). National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide/14
- Stevens, E. A., Park, S., & Vaughn, S. (2019). A review of summarizing and main idea interventions for struggling readers in grades 3 through 12: 1978-2016. Remedial and Special Education, 40(3), 131 to 149. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741932517749940
