Cloze | Comprehension Skills & Strategies

Comprehension strategies are often used during reading. This is because, people need to understand what the text is saying. Some comprehension strategies are: prior knowledge, skimming & scanning, predicting, visualizing, making connections. There are many more strategies that can help people understand a text. To use these strategies before, during or after reading people start by identifying which strategy to use. For example: before a person has read a short text, they can use prediction and prior knowledge. 

Before reading a text, prior knowledge, prediction and inferring can be used. Prior knowledge is used to give knowledge known before to the topic. To predict, people often look at the image or read the title to get a small understanding of the main topic. To infer, people work out what they think is going to happen next.

During reading, self-monitoring, visualizing, and skimming/scanning can be used. Self-monitoring is used by a person detecting their own mistakes. Visualizing gets people to create an image. This helps people to gain an understanding of what a text is about. To skim, read through the text quickly and process the information quickly. Reading the topic sentences of different paragraphs help people scan a book.  

After reading a text people can use: making connections, summarising and synthesizing. Connecting an event that happened from the text to another text, to the world or to an event that happened to the person is called making connections. To make connections people often think of an event that happened in the text to the world, themselves, or another text. Summarising consists people to read the text and write about the main events in the story. To synthesize, people usually identify the relevant information and evaluate that.

Understanding how to use these comprehension strategies unlock more knowledge behind the text. The strategies can also open or unlock a new understanding of the text.

LI: to practise comprehension skills.