Comprehension strategies, and what outranks them.
Most lists of reading comprehension strategies leave out the finding that matters most: what a reader already knows about the topic predicts comprehension more strongly than general reading ability does. The strategies below are worth teaching. They are also the smaller half of the answer.
The finding most lists omit
In a 1988 study that has been replicated in spirit many times since, researchers gave Year 7–8 students a passage about a baseball game. Students were grouped by reading ability and by how much they knew about baseball. Prior topic knowledge had a stronger effect than general reading ability on comprehension and recall: weaker readers who knew baseball performed as well as strong readers who did not RDG-08.
This is the single most useful thing a parent can know about comprehension, because it explains the pattern that otherwise looks like inconsistency. A child who follows one text easily and stalls on the next is usually not reading badly on the second. The second text assumes something the first did not.
Where the knowledge comes from
Printed school English contains roughly 88,500 distinct word families, and the classic corpus analysis argued that even systematic direct instruction could not account for a significant proportion of the words children actually learn, nor cover more than a modest proportion of the words they will meet RDG-18. Something else does most of the work, and the volume figures show what.
More than two hundred times the exposure. Put the other way round, a full year of the low-volume reader’s out-of-school reading is about two days of the high-volume reader’s RDG-09. OECD analysis found students who read daily for enjoyment scored the equivalent of about one and a half years of schooling ahead of those who did not — and that what mattered was reading daily for enjoyment rather than the number of hours spent RDG-16.
The strategies, kept short on purpose
These are worth teaching and worth practising. They are listed briefly because the argument above is that they are the smaller half, and a page that padded them to listicle length would be contradicting itself.
- Read for the question the text is answering. Before reading closely, work out what problem or question the passage exists to address. A text held together by its question is far easier to hold in mind than one held together by its order.
- Say the paragraph back in one sentence. After each paragraph, state its job in a sentence — not a summary of its content, but what it does for the argument. Where that sentence will not come, comprehension has already broken and rereading is worth it.
- Predict, then check. Guess where the text is going, then read on to see. Being wrong is the useful case: a failed prediction marks precisely where your model of the text and the text itself part company.
- Notice the words doing the joining. However, therefore, although, in spite of. These carry the logical shape of a passage, and readers who skim them lose the argument while still following the topic.
- Build the knowledge the text assumes. When a passage is hard because of what it takes for granted rather than how it is written, the fix is the subject, not the technique. This is the strategy the research puts first, and the one least often taught as one.
How common the difficulty is
The Grattan Institute estimates about a third of Australian children cannot read proficiently — roughly eight students in a classroom of 24 RDG-01. Over the longer run, Australian 15-year-olds’ PISA reading scores fell by more than 25 points between the early 2000s and 2022, about a year of schooling, though performance has been stable since 2015 RDG-12.
Both figures are worth holding lightly in the individual case. They describe a national distribution, not a particular child, and a child who reads slowly is not thereby one of the eight.
Where these claims come from
Every figure above is drawn from the reading domain of the Evidence Register, where each claim appears with its verbatim quote and full citation. The vocabulary domain carries the word-knowledge research this page touches on.
Working on it with someone
Argo Academics is a one-to-one English tutoring practice in Melbourne, where Callum Hay teaches every lesson personally. Reading closely is most of what the lessons do — and where a text is hard because of what it assumes rather than how it is written, that is visible in a way it never is on a worksheet.
If you are not sure whether that is the problem, the two-minute diagnostic asks what you have actually seen at home rather than what a score says — which is the more useful evidence at this stage.