Biology Forums - Study Force

What are the preparational strategies for improving reading comprehension, and what role do they play in the comprehension process?

The preparational strategies for improving reading comprehension include the following:
1   Activating prior knowledge before reading (answering teacher questions first, then asking themselves questions on their own)
2   Setting purpose and goals (thinking about overall goals for reading, and the specific goal for reading this selection)
3   Previewing (also called surveying, looking at title, table of contents, headings, introduction, summary, and illustrations to get an overview of the reading selection)
4   Predicting (answering teacher questions, and later asking themselves questions, that ask what they might read based on their experience as well as textual clues)

The role of preparational strategies in the comprehension process is to get students ready, interested, and motivated to read a selection, story, or entire book. They help students think about why they are reading, what the text looks like, and what they may find out. These can become lifelong strategies that will be used as students move into higher grades and are faced with increasingly complex reading materials.