FREE PRINTABLE READING COMPREHENSION WORKSHEETS
How can you help your students improve their reading comprehension skills?Students can be shown the mistakes they commonly make when doing a reading comprehension exam. Identifying these mistakes and practicing ways to avoid them is a powerful way to improve their reading comprehension skills.What mistakes do students commonly make? 1). Students refer to their memory rather than the text. This can be a real problem if the text is an excerpt from a well known story or a different version of it. It is easier and quicker to turn to your memory, but some students may not realize that the memory is not always reliable or that the text may actually be different. Some classroom activities that could be used to practice avoiding this mistake are: b) Read the questions first so that you are looking for the answers as you read. c) Practice marking the text with circling, underlining or writing key words in the margin. This makes it easier to go back and find answers. d) Be aware that one story can have many different versions. e) Be aware that memory can be an unreliable resource, especially when it comes to fine detail. 2). Students struggle with the meaning of the question. Questions like, How was the central problem resolved? Which statement is not about the narrator?, are not easy for some students to understand. If they don't understand the question, then they have little chance of answering it. Some classroom activities that can be used to practice avoiding this mistake are: b) Study the types of questions usually found in reading comprehension exams. Search through old tests and make a list of questions. Students can discuss as a class, what type of answers the questions are asking them to produce. 3) Students don't check their answers. They don't because they think it means virtually doing the test again. For many students, the thought of this overwhelming. What they don't know is that there are strategies that they can use to simplify the process. Some classroom activities that can be used to practice avoiding this mistake are: b) Take a break before re-checking. Look up from the reading comprehension exam and stretch a little. Taking your eyes away from the paper, stretching and breathing deeply can all refresh the mind and improve your chances of spotting mistakes. c) Check the questions for negatives. Questions like, "Who was afraid?", can easily be misread as "Who wasn't afraid?". Do you want more reading comprehension resources? Try these links.9 Reading Comprehension Activities
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