Self-Regulated Comprehension

Help Your Child Learn Self-Regulated Reading Comprehension

As your child becomes a proficient reader, he learns to supervise his own reading comprehension. He will know which reading assignments require him to highlight the main points and which require extensive note-taking. He will know what kinds of novels he can breeze through and what books require more effort. You may see him attempting a difficult book with a dictionary at his side. This is self-regulated reading comprehension.

Your child can develop his reading compression with help from his teachers and you. Educator Michael Pressley says that "children can be taught to be self-regulated comprehenders and become more active readers. "An active reader is involved in what he is reading, and he gets the most out of the experience.

Reading strategies are vital to self-regulated reading comprehension. Armed with these, your child can tackle any kind of reading assignments. These strategies can be taught to and modeled for your child. He may already take pleasure in predicting how the story or movie will end. That's predicting and it's just one reading strategy a child can employ as part of learning reading comprehension.

Other strategies include asking questions about a reading passage or answering your questions about it; re-telling a story; re-reading difficult material; taking notes; highlighting or underling information; outlining; summarizing; and drawing pictures to help visualize an event, concept, or person. If he doesn't like how a story ends, ask him to re-write the ending. You can show him how to make tables and charts to remember important information or to compare and contrast characters, countries, or historic figures. Encourage him to explain concepts he's learning to you, and help him with those that are difficult.

You will want to discuss reading strategies with your child's teacher and see what ones she is teaching. Make a point of visiting the class for reading lessons and seeing these techniques in action. The ultimate goal of self-regulated reading comprehension is to nurture a child's independence so that he is able to take over [his] own reading and thinking. "He will be able to excel at any type of reading that comes his way if he learns the skill of reading comprehension.