Comprehension in reading
Explore practical strategies, research insights, and tools for strengthening reading comprehension across all grade levels and learning needs.
What is Comprehension in Reading?
Reading comprehension goes far beyond decoding words. It’s the process of making meaning from text — and for that to happen, readers must draw on a range of cognitive and language-based skills at once. According to Scarborough’s Reading Rope, strong reading comprehension depends on two strands being tightly woven together: language comprehension and word recognition. Fluent readers are not just those who read accurately and quickly, but those who can also connect ideas, follow arguments, and extract key details from what they read.
To truly understand a text — especially non-fiction texts — readers need more than vocabulary knowledge or sentence-level fluency. They need comprehension strategies that allow them to build mental models, ask questions, and check for understanding as they go.
Oral comprehension plays a key role in this, especially in younger or less experienced readers. If a child can’t understand something when it’s read aloud, they’re unlikely to understand it when reading independently.
Effective comprehension instruction focuses on explicitly teaching students how to think about their thinking. Active readers are taught how to pause, predict, clarify, and summarise, helping them become lifelong readers who don’t just consume information but engage with it. This requires scaffolding. For example, asking comprehension questions, modelling how to unpack a complex paragraph, or supporting students in making connections across texts are all ways to strengthen the language comprehension strand of the rope.
Ultimately, the goal of reading is understanding — and that means comprehension must be intentionally taught, not simply assumed. Building strong reading skills takes time, explicit teaching, and regular opportunities to practise with meaningful texts.
Background Research in reading comprehension
Reading comprehension isn’t just about understanding words — it’s about how the brain connects language, context, and meaning across different systems. Research by Zimmerman (2003) and others in the field of neuroscience (Bookheimer, 2002; Ferstl et al., 2008; Just et al., 1996; Xu et al., 2005) confirms that comprehension relies on complex, highly interconnected networks in the brain. These networks draw on multiple areas to process meaning, link ideas, and decode what’s on the page — a process easily disrupted by distraction, limited vocabulary, or unfamiliar language structures in learning materials.
These cognitive demands help explain why comprehension difficulties persist, even into adulthood. Studies focusing on higher education (Barletta et al., 2005; Yáñez Botello, 2013) reveal that many university students still operate at a literal level when engaging with non-fiction books and academic texts. Making inferences, recognising text structure, or using context clues to unpack deeper meaning remains a significant challenge. Alarmingly, Ntereke and Ramoroka (2017) found that only 12.4% of students scored well in a reading comprehension test, while over a third struggled significantly.
The picture in secondary schools mirrors this concern. Around 25% of 15-year-olds have a reading age of 12 or below, with the gap between boys and girls growing wider after primary school. This has clear implications for English lessons, where students are expected to interpret increasingly complex reading materials without always having the strategies or support in place to succeed.
To respond to these challenges, teachers need more than content — they need to build in regular opportunities for reading comprehension to be practised, modelled, and developed. Even turning a short text into a structured, fun activity can help students engage more actively, especially when reading non-fiction or tackling unfamiliar vocabulary.
Using Structural Learning Tools to Deepen Reading Comprehension
To move beyond surface-level reading and support deeper comprehension, it helps to structure classroom experiences that activate mental processes and build on both word reading and comprehension (both listening and reading). The Structural Learning Toolkit offers a wide range of approaches to develop comprehension strategies in ways that feel purposeful and engaging. Here are six practical ways to use the tools to improve reading skills and foster critical thinking skills across grade levels:
1. Use the Thinking Framework to Anchor Comprehension Questions
Framing comprehension questions using verbs from the Thinking Framework (e.g. connect, explain, validate) helps students move beyond literal recall to deeper reasoning. Whether reading a picture book or a longer non-fiction text, these anchored questions support oral comprehension and promote transferable comprehension skills. It also provides a framework for teachers to design informal assessments focused on how students interpret and justify key details.
2. Make Phonics Playful with Writer’s Block
Phonological awareness and phonemic awareness are fundamental to early reading ability, but that doesn’t mean they need to be dull. Using Writer’s Block, children can physically build words, explore sounds, and play with rhymes and spelling patterns. For example, they might build the word "ship" and then swap in new blocks to create "chip", "shop", or "slip" — helping them internalise sound-letter relationships through active learning.
3. Use Graphic Organizers to Support Text Structure Awareness
Understanding how a text is structured is key to comprehension. Flowcharts, Venn diagrams, and input-output charts from the toolkit help students visually organise ideas and relationships between events or concepts. These tools support reasoning and help students retain key details, especially when working with non-fiction or more complex texts.
4. Develop Reasoning Through Oracy
Oral comprehension is deeply tied to verbal reasoning. Using oracy tools like Talk Tactics or Think-Pair-Share helps students verbalise their understanding, test their ideas with peers, and refine their thinking. These activities also offer valuable opportunities for formative, informal assessments of comprehension at every grade level.
5. Model Mental Processes with Block-Based Planning
When students plan their responses using Writer’s Block — breaking down main ideas, identifying supporting details, and sequencing events — they are making their thinking visible. This promotes metacognitive awareness and supports the development of longer, more structured responses.
6. Use Thinking Routines to Build Reading Habits
Embedding short routines such as “retrieve and connect” or “sequence and reflect” encourages students to approach reading with a strategy in mind. These micro-practices develop over time into robust comprehension habits, supporting both reading skills and confidence.
Reading comprehension strategy instruction
Effective reading instruction requires deliberate attention to both key dimensions of reading: word recognition and language comprehension. These two areas develop through different types of teaching, and each demands specific strategies. Early reading instruction often emphasises phonics — the understanding that letters represent sounds — to support decoding and the accurate, automatic recognition of words. This is a foundational skill, particularly for younger or less experienced readers.
Buchweitz (2009) argues that phonological rehearsal — the mental repetition of words — can enhance reading comprehension by boosting working memory. In theory, this should help readers hold and process information as they read. However, the continuing gap in reading performance, even at higher education levels, suggests that this traditional focus on phonics may not be sufficient. It raises a broader question: Are our current strategies adequately supporting students’ long-term comprehension, or do we need to rethink our approach?
Comprehension itself is shaped by far more than word reading alone. It relies heavily on linguistic knowledge — particularly vocabulary and grammar — and background knowledge drawn from lived experience and wide reading. Pupils learn to interpret and engage with texts not only through instruction but also through exposure: rich conversations with teachers, shared reading of diverse texts, and the opportunity to explore fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and beyond.
Yet, access to these experiences isn’t equal. Not every student arrives with the same background knowledge or home support, and not all have the same opportunity to develop a love of reading. This makes inclusive comprehension strategy instruction more urgent — not just as a literacy goal, but as an issue of social justice. We must ensure that students are equipped not only with the tools to decode, but also with the means to understand, reflect, and grow through what they read.
Language Acquisition and Comprehension
In developing reading comprehension, it’s important to recognise the foundational role of language acquisition — a process shaped not only by cognitive development but also by the quality of teacher interaction and guided language activity. Drawing on the work of Vygotsky and Chomsky, we can view the teacher not simply as a provider of content, but as a facilitator of structured, purposeful language experiences across all stages of schooling.
While guided support and structured reading activities can assist early development, they are only part of a much broader process. Research suggests that comprehension is not solely a cognitive function. It also involves emotional processing, memory retrieval, integration of concepts, recognition of thematic patterns, and even the emotional value assigned to texts. Reading for understanding engages multiple areas of the brain, calling on both hemispheres to handle the many subprocesses involved.
Chomsky’s early work on abstract syntax (1957, 1965, 1970), later expanded to explore the relationship between syntax and semantics (1981, 1995), frames reading comprehension as something far more complex than simply decoding letter-sound patterns. Rather than extracting meaning word by word, readers form understanding through sentence-level structures and contextual interpretation. When those neural mechanisms are underdeveloped or challenged — due to cultural, linguistic, or neurodiverse differences — this comprehension process can be disrupted.
Recent studies reinforce this complexity. Farris et al. (2021) found that for college students with differing abilities in decoding and comprehension, vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness were key factors in explaining low comprehension performance. Interestingly, by the time students reach further or higher education, many have developed coping strategies that allow them to manage text comprehension even with weaker decoding skills.
Assessment methods also play a role in shaping reading comprehension. Research by Kim and Petschers (2020) suggests that narrative-based tasks are more effective for supporting meaning-making than formats such as multiple-choice or short-recall questions. This has clear implications: when designing comprehension activities, we should consider approaches that support background knowledge and conceptual development — not just accuracy in response, but depth in understanding.
Fundamental comprehension difficulties
It’s not uncommon for students to appear confident in reading aloud — successfully decoding symbols on the page, pronouncing words with fluency — and yet still struggle to understand what the text is actually saying. Decoding alone, while essential, does not guarantee comprehension. True understanding requires students to go beyond surface reading and engage in higher order thinking.
Comprehension involves the ability to interpret meaning, synthesise information, and apply it to new contexts. Drawing on Bloom’s taxonomy, it requires skills such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation — not just the ability to recall words or identify facts. Students need to make meaning from what they read and use that meaning in order to reason, make predictions, and draw conclusions.
This challenge becomes more pronounced as students progress through the education system. In higher education, the demands of academic reading and writing require students to work with complex texts — often dense with abstract language, unfamiliar terminology, and layered arguments. At this level, comprehension is not optional; it is fundamental to academic success.
Simple but effective strategies can support this kind of deeper reading. Techniques such as scanning for keywords, paraphrasing sections of academic writing, using dictionaries to explore unfamiliar terms, and compiling personal glossaries are all helpful. These strategies allow learners to unpack complex vocabulary and build the linguistic precision needed for both comprehension and expression.
In school settings, supporting students with targeted vocabulary work is just as vital. Activities such as discussing the meaning of keywords, exploring synonyms using a thesaurus, or applying new terms in their own sentences help develop language knowledge. These small, structured interventions can have a significant impact on a student’s ability to make sense of what they read — and, just as importantly, to explain it to others.
Key Studies on Effective Reading Comprehension Strategies
For teachers aiming to enhance students’ comprehension performance, these studies provide helpful resources grounded in research. They explore how different reading strategies—especially those that support cognitive processes and executive function - can aid both average readers and poor comprehenders. Strategies such as using graphic organisers, asking open-ended questions, and tailoring reading exercises to reading level show measurable impacts on comprehension development.
- The Effectiveness of Graphic Organisers for Improving Reading Comprehension in ESL Learners: A Systematic Literature Review – Kai Lai Hon and J. Mukundan (2023)
This comprehensive review of 31 studies found that graphic organisers significantly improved reading comprehension by helping students process complex information visually and activate executive function during reading. The strategy was especially useful for poor comprehenders, allowing them to organize ideas, identify key concepts, and recall information more effectively. However, success depended on selecting appropriate organisers and addressing students’ varying reading levels and visual literacy. - Using Graphic Organizer to Improve the Students’ Reading Comprehension Achievement – Prihatin Puji Astuti (2020)
In this quasi-experimental study, students who used graphic organisers during reading exercises outperformed those who used no specific strategy. The graphic organiser group showed marked improvement in understanding main ideas and making inferences, which are central cognitive processes for comprehension. The study emphasized that open-ended questions, guided by graphic organisers, helped deepen comprehension, especially for students initially scoring below standard. - Promoting Students’ Reading Comprehension Using Graphic Organizer: A Classroom Action Research – N. Sari, N. Drajati, and Dewi Rochsantiningsih (2019)
Conducted in a junior high school, this classroom-based research highlighted the use of story-mapping graphic organisers as a tool to help students track setting, character goals, and outcomes. Students demonstrated a significant gain in comprehension scores after the intervention. The study concludes that graphic organisers not only support foundational reading skills but also serve as scaffolds for struggling readers who benefit from more structured ways to engage with texts.