The Super Six Comprehension Strategies, as the name suggests, are a set of six strategies that help students improve their reading comprehension skills. These strategies include predicting, visualising, connecting, questioning, inferring, and summarising.

Using these strategies can encourage students to actively engage with the text, think critically about topics, and promote deeper understanding of the material. By incorporating the Super Six strategies into reading activities, discussions, and assessments, you can help your students develop essential reading comprehension skills and become more proficient students.

Let’s discuss what each of these strategies are and how to incorporate them into your lessons.

Super Six Strategy #1: Making Connections

Making Connections is a powerful tool that helps young students engage more deeply with the text they are reading. It encourages them to actively link the information they encounter in a text to their own prior knowledge, experiences, and insights.

By making these meaningful connections, they are essentially bridging the gap between the new information presented in the text and their existing mental frameworks. Thus, students are able to better understand and retain the content, as well as draw more relevant and thoughtful conclusions.

Let’s look at how exactly this strategy contributes to improving reading comprehension.

Role in Improving Reading Comprehension

Here's how Making Connections enhances reading comprehension:

• Personalization: When students connect the text to their personal experiences, it becomes more meaningful and relevant to them. This personalization enhances engagement and motivation to understand the text.

• Contextualization: Making connections helps students place the text in context by linking it to their prior knowledge and understanding. This contextualization aids in comprehending unfamiliar concepts or situations presented in the text.

• Relatability: By connecting the text to other texts they have read, students can draw parallels, identify patterns, and deepen their understanding of themes, characters, or plot developments.

• Broadening Perspectives: Making connections to the world beyond the text exposes students to diverse viewpoints, cultures, and experiences. This broadening of perspectives enriches their comprehension by offering new insights and interpretations.

• Critical Thinking: Making connections requires students to analyse and evaluate the text in relation to their own experiences or other sources of information. This critical thinking process enhances their ability to draw conclusions, make inferences, and engage with the text at a deeper level.

With so many benefits to offer, you must include this strategy in your classes. Let’s see how.

Teaching Strategies

Here are some effective ways to integrate the Making Connections strategy into teaching:

• Text-to-Self Connections: Encourage students to relate the text to their personal experiences, feelings, beliefs, or situations. Prompt them to discuss how they connect with the characters, events, or themes in the text based on their own lives.

• Text-to-Text Connections: Have students make connections between the text they are currently reading and other texts they have read before. Encourage them to compare characters, settings, themes, or styles across different texts to deepen their understanding.

• Text-to-World Connections: Encourage students to consider how the text relates to real-world events, issues, or historical contexts. Help them explore connections between the text and broader societal, cultural, or global perspectives.

• Interactive Read-Alouds: During read-aloud sessions, pause at key points in the text to ask students to make connections. Prompt them to share how the story reminds them of something they have experienced, read, or heard about before.

• Graphic Organisers: Use graphic organisers such as Venn diagrams, T-charts, or concept maps to visually represent the connections students make between the text, themselves, other texts, and the world. This visual aid can help students organise their thoughts and gain better understanding.

• Discussion Groups: Facilitate small group discussions where students can share and compare the connections they have made while reading the text. Encourage them to listen to and learn from their peers' perspectives, fostering a collaborative learning environment.

• Writing Assignments: Incorporate reflective writing assignments where students can articulate the connections they have made while reading. Encourage them to explain the significance of these connections and how they enhance their comprehension of the text.

• Socratic Questioning: Use open-ended and probing questions to prompt students to think critically and make connections while reading. Encourage them to justify their connections with evidence from the text or their own experiences.

By incorporating these strategies into teaching, you can help students develop their ability to make meaningful connections between the text, themselves, other texts, and the world, leading to enhanced reading comprehension and a deeper appreciation for literature.

Super Six Strategy #2: Monitoring

Monitoring requires students to constantly check their own comprehension, ask themselves questions, and adjust their reading strategies as needed. As they navigate through a text, they must pause periodically to assess whether they are grasping the key ideas, following the narrative, or making sense of the information presented. This self-reflective process allows students to identify areas of confusion or uncertainty, prompting them to slow down, re-read, or seek clarification.

The benefits of the Monitoring strategy extend far beyond a single reading experience. With practice, it becomes an integral part of students’ cognitive toolkit, enabling them to approach any text with a critical and discerning eye.

Let’s look at how this strategy works to improve reading skills.

Role in Improving Reading Comprehension

Monitoring enhances reading comprehension by:

• Self-Awareness: By monitoring their comprehension, students become more aware of their understanding of the text. They can identify when they are confused or when they need to re-read a passage for better clarity.

• Identifying Difficulties: Monitoring helps students recognize when they encounter challenging vocabulary, complex sentences, or unfamiliar concepts. By pinpointing these difficulties, they can take steps to address them, such as looking up definitions or seeking clarification.

• Clarifying Understanding: When students monitor their comprehension, they can pause to reflect on the meaning of the text and clarify any confusing or ambiguous parts, which prevents misinterpretation.

• Adjusting Strategies: Monitoring allows students to adjust their reading strategies based on their understanding of the text. If they realise they are not comprehending a passage, they can employ strategies such as re-reading, summarising, or asking questions to improve comprehension.

• Metacognitive Skills: Monitoring helps develop the ability to reflect on and regulate one's own thinking processes. By monitoring their comprehension, students develop metacognitive skills that enable them to become more strategic and efficient.

• Improving Engagement: Actively monitoring comprehension keeps students engaged with the text and encourages them to stay focused on extracting meaning from the material, which leads to a more immersive reading experience.

To help your students become more proficient, thoughtful, and self-regulated, you should get them to practise Monitoring more, by incorporating the following strategies.

Also Read: Guide On Levelled Readers

Teaching Strategies

Here are some strategies to integrate Monitoring into your teaching:

• Explicit Instruction: Teach students how to monitor their comprehension by explaining the importance of checking their understanding while reading. Provide examples of monitoring strategies and model how to self-monitor during reading.

• Think-Alouds: Use think-alouds to demonstrate how proficient students monitor their comprehension. Verbalize thought processes, questions, and strategies while reading a text aloud to help students understand how to actively monitor their understanding.

• Self-Awareness Strategies: Teach students self-awareness strategies such as self-questioning, clarifying confusion, summarising key points, and predicting what will happen next. Encourage them to use these strategies to monitor their comprehension as they read.

• Graphic Organisers: Provide students with graphic organisers, such as KWL charts (What I Know, What I Want to Know, What I Learned), to help them monitor their understanding before, during, and after reading. These visual aids can aid in organising thoughts and improve comprehension.

• Reading Journals: Encourage students to keep reading journals where they can record their thoughts, questions, predictions, connections, and reflections as they read. Reviewing these journals can help students monitor their progress and comprehension over time.

• Peer Discussions: Facilitate discussion among students about their understanding of the text, share monitoring strategies, and ask them to help each other clarify confusing parts.

• Reading Response Activities: Assign reading response activities that require students to demonstrate their understanding of the text through written or verbal responses. Encourage them to reflect on their comprehension process and identify areas where monitoring was helpful.

• Formative Assessments: Use formative assessments, such as quizzes, exit tickets, or short written responses, to gauge students' comprehension and monitoring skills. Provide feedback based on their responses to help them improve their monitoring strategies.

With these teaching strategies, you’ll be able to help your students actively engage with the text, enhance reading comprehension, and promote critical thinking, problem-solving, and lifelong learning skills.

Also Read: Mastering Reading Comprehension

Super Six Strategy #3: Predicting

At its core, Predicting involves actively anticipating what will happen next in a story or what information will be presented in a nonfiction passage. This strategy engages the student’s prior knowledge, experiences, and intuition to make informed guesses about the content and direction of the text.

By predicting, students become active participants in the reading process, constantly testing their hypotheses and refining their understanding as they progress through the material. As students make predictions and validate or adjust them, they are actively constructing meaning and developing a more nuanced interpretation of the content.

Since it’s such a powerful tool, let’s dive into the details of how Predicting improves comprehension.

Role in Improving Reading Comprehension

Predicting plays an important role in improving reading comprehension by eliciting:

• Engagement: Predicting prompts students to actively participate in the reading process by anticipating upcoming events, outcomes, or developments in the text. This creates a sense of curiosity and investment in the material, leading to improved comprehension.

• Critical Thinking: Making predictions requires students to analyse the text, consider contextual cues, and draw logical conclusions about potential future events. This sharpens their analytical skills and encourages deeper engagement with the material.

• Inference Skills: Predicting helps students develop their inference skills by connecting explicit information in the text with their background knowledge and understanding. By making educated guesses about what might happen next, students strengthen their ability to make inferences and draw conclusions.

• Active Reading: Predicting encourages students to actively read and interact with the text rather than passively consuming information. By constantly thinking ahead and formulating predictions, students maintain focus and attentiveness, which in turn enhances comprehension.

• Confirmation or Adjustment: As students progress through the text, they can confirm or adjust their predictions based on new information, events, or twists in the narrative. This process of revisiting and refining predictions promotes a dynamic and flexible approach to reading comprehension.

• Engagement with Text Structure: Making predictions often involves considering the structure of the text, such as foreshadowing, plot development, or character arcs, which improves their understanding of how the text is organised and how different components interconnect.

The Predicting strategy helps students develop a proactive and inquisitive approach to comprehension, so it behoves you to use teaching strategies that incorporate prediction. Let’s take a look at them.

Teaching Strategies

To integrate predicting into your teaching practices, you can use the following methods:

• Activating Prior Knowledge: Encourage students to activate their prior knowledge before reading a text by discussing the title, cover, or any relevant background information. Prompt them to make predictions based on what they already know.

• Previewing Text Features: Guide students in previewing text features such as headings, subheadings, illustrations, and captions to make predictions about the content and structure of the text. Encourage them to anticipate what they might learn from the text.

• Picture Walks: Conduct a picture walk by showing students key illustrations or images from the text before reading. Ask them to make predictions about the characters, setting, plot, or main ideas based on the visuals.

• Prediction Prompts: Provide students with prediction prompts, such as "I predict that...", to guide their thinking before, during, and after reading. Encourage them to support their predictions with evidence from the text.

• Prediction Journals: Have students keep prediction journals where they can record their predictions before reading a text and revise or confirm them as they progress through the text.

• Prediction Charts: Use prediction charts or graphic organisers to help students organise their predictions, evidence, and outcomes. Encourage them to revisit their predictions and analyse how accurate they were at the end of the text.

• Prediction Discussions: Hold class discussions where students can share their predictions, justify their reasoning, and compare their thoughts with their peers. Encourage them to consider alternative interpretations and viewpoints.

• Prediction Reflections: After reading a text, have students reflect on their initial predictions and evaluate their accuracy. Discuss how their predictions influenced their understanding of the text and what they learned from the experience.

By incorporating these Prediction strategies into teaching, you can help students not only enhance their reading comprehension but also develop curiosity, analytical thinking, and a deeper connection to the text.

Super Six Strategy #4: Summarising

Summarising is the ability to distil key ideas and essential information from a text. By mastering this skill, students can enhance their understanding, retention, and critical thinking abilities.

The process of summarising encourages students to actively engage with the text, identifying the main themes, key points, and salient details. This deep level of engagement helps students to synthesise information, draw connections and recognize patterns, leading to a better grasp over the meaning and significance of the material.

Summarising is a crucial skill for students to learn as it improves their overall academic performance. 

Role in Improving Reading Comprehension

Here's how summarising plays an important role in improving reading comprehension:

• Focus on Main Ideas: Summarising requires students to identify and prioritise the main ideas, central themes, and important details in a text. By distilling the content into a summary, students clarify their understanding of the most essential elements of the material.

• Retrieval and Synthesis: Summarising involves retrieving information from the text, synthesising it, and rephrasing it in one's own words. This process of mentally organising and rearticulating content enhances memory retention and comprehension.

• Comprehension Check: Summarising allows students to assess their understanding of the text by articulating its key points in a succinct manner. If students struggle to summarise effectively, it may indicate areas of the text that require further review or clarification.

• Critical Thinking: By requiring students to analyse, evaluate, and condense information from the text to create a summary, students develop their ability to process and interpret complex content.

• Summarising Strategies: Summarising strategies, such as identifying the main idea, outlining key events, or paraphrasing key details can help students extract meaning from the text, reinforce comprehension, and enhance their ability to convey information concisely.

• Retention and Recall: Summaries serve as effective study aids that help reinforce learning and facilitate later recall.

Summarising, as a skill, serves students as a powerful tool in multiple subjects, not just reading comprehension. So, let’s talk about some strategies to build this skill when you teach.

Teaching Strategies

Here are some ways of incorporating Summarising into your teaching practices:

• Identifying Main Ideas: Teach students how to identify main ideas, key details, and supporting information while reading. Encourage them to focus on the most important aspects of the text when summarising.

• Summarising Strategies: Introduce students to different summarising strategies, such as using graphic organisers, creating outlines, or writing concise summaries in their own words.

• Summarization Prompts: Provide students with summarization prompts, such as "In a nutshell, the main idea is...", to guide their summarising process. Encourage them to capture the essence of the text in a few sentences.

• Summarising Graphic Organisers: Use graphic organisers like story maps, main idea webs, or summarising templates to help students organise their thoughts and structure their summaries.

• Peer Summarisation: Incorporate peer summarisation activities where students can work together to summarise a text, compare their summaries, and provide feedback to each other.

• Summarising Exit Tickets: Use summarising exit tickets as a formative assessment tool to gauge students' understanding of the text. Ask students to write a brief summary of what they have read before leaving the class.

• Summarisation Challenges: Challenge students to summarise a text within a specific word limit or time frame to promote concise and effective summarization skills. Encourage them to prioritise key information.

• Summarising Reflections: After summarising a text, have students reflect on the process, discuss challenges they encountered, and evaluate the effectiveness of their summaries.

By incorporating the Summarising strategy into teaching, you can help students develop essential summarisation skills, improve their ability to extract important information from texts, and deepen their understanding of content.

Super Six Strategy #5: Questioning

This strategy encourages students to lean into their natural curiosity and ask questions. You only need to guide them to ask the right questions to  actively seek to clarify ambiguities, make connections, and uncover deeper insights. As students become more adept at questioning, they develop the ability to identify key information, recognize patterns, and make informed inferences. It is also quite helpful in navigating unfamiliar concepts and ideas.

Let’s see how the Questioning strategy enhances reading comprehension.

Role in Improving Reading Comprehension

Here's how effective Questioning improves reading comprehension:

• Active Engagement: Questioning prompts students to interact with the text actively by formulating inquiries about the content, characters, events, or themes, which fosters curiosity, critical thinking, and a deeper connection to the material.

• Clarification of Concepts: By posing questions while reading, students can clarify confusing or ambiguous concepts, terms, or ideas in the text, which can help students resolve uncertainties, expand their knowledge, and improve comprehension.

• Depth of Understanding: Questioning encourages students to delve beneath the surface of the text and explore deeper meanings, implications, and connections. Through thoughtful inquiries, students enhance their ability to grasp complex ideas and themes.

• Prediction and Inference: Questions can lead students to make predictions, draw inferences, and anticipate outcomes based on clues and evidence in the text.

• Evaluation and Reflection: Questioning prompts students to evaluate the text critically and reflect on its significance, which deepens comprehension by encouraging students to engage with the material thoughtfully and analytically.

• Metacognitive Awareness: Students become more conscious of their thinking processes, strategies, and comprehension skills by reflecting on their questions and seeking answers.

To help your students cultivate a proactive and inquisitive approach to comprehension, you can use the following strategies to encourage Questioning.

Teaching Strategies

Here are some effective ways to integrate Questioning into teaching practices:

• Pre-Reading Questions: Encourage students to generate questions before reading a text based on titles, headings, or images. This can activate their prior knowledge and curiosity.

• Question Stems: Provide students with question stems (e.g., Who, What, Where, When, Why, How) to scaffold their questioning process. Model how to formulate different types of questions to explore various aspects of the text.

• Questioning Strategies: Teach students different questioning strategies, such as asking literal, inferential, and evaluative questions. Encourage them to dig deeper into the text by posing more complex questions.

• Think-Alouds: Model think-alouds to demonstrate how to generate questions while reading. Verbalising thought processes can help students understand how questioning contributes to comprehension.

• Questioning Circles: Implement questioning circles where students take turns asking questions about the text, responding to each other's questions, and building on the discussion.

• Questioning Prompts: Provide students with questioning prompts like "I wonder why..." or "What do you think will happen next?" to stimulate their thinking and encourage active engagement with the text.

• Socratic Seminars: Organise Socratic seminars where students engage in dialogue, ask open-ended questions, and explore different perspectives related to the text.

Questioning not only enhances reading comprehension but also nurtures curiosity, critical thinking, and encourages students to interact meaningfully with the content. Thus, making it an essential skill to learn in the classroom.

Super Six Strategy #6: Visualising

Visualising is the act of creating mental images or visualisations based on the information provided. It helps students to better connect with and retain the content they are reading. This strategy encourages students to go beyond the literal words on the page and tap into their own imagination and experiences to bring the text to life.

When students visualise, they are not merely passively absorbing the words; they are actively constructing meaning and forming a deeper connection with the material. This cognitive process helps students better understand complex ideas, remember key details, and even empathise with the characters or situations described. 

Next, let’s examine how visualising aids reading comprehension in students.

Role in Improving Reading Comprehension

Here's how creating mental images, sensory impressions, and vivid representations of the text improves reading comprehension:

• Enhanced Imagination: Visualising encourages students to use their imagination to construct mental images of characters, settings, events, and details described in the text. This process stimulates creativity, sensory engagement, and makes the text more vivid and memorable.

• Increased Engagement: Creating visual images while reading activates multiple areas of the brain and enhances reader engagement with the text.

• Improved Memory Retention: Visualising information helps improve memory retention by associating textual details with mental images. Students are more likely to remember key events, descriptions, and concepts when they mentally visualise the text.

• Comprehension of Abstract Concepts: Visualising can aid in understanding abstract or complex concepts by translating them into concrete mental images. Metaphors, symbolism, relationships, and abstract ideas, become more accessible and easier to grasp.

• Inference and Prediction: By creating mental images and visualising possible outcomes, students engage in higher-order thinking skills, such as analysis, interpretation, and prediction.

• Empathy and Perspective-Taking: Visualising characters, scenes, and situations can foster empathy and perspective-taking by allowing students to step into the shoes of the characters and experience events from different viewpoints.

While it may seem like an additional step to incorporate Visualization into your lessons, it can help your students develop their imaginative skills, enhance their memory retention, and engage more deeply with the text. So let’s take a look at some teaching strategies for Visualisation.

Teaching Strategies

Here’s how you can integrate Visualisation into your lessons:

• Descriptive Language: Encourage students to pay attention to descriptive language in the text that evokes sensory details, vivid imagery, and emotional responses. Prompt them to visualise scenes, characters, settings, and events based on the author's descriptions.

• Graphic Organisers: Use graphic organisers like mind maps, storyboards, or visualisation templates to help students organise their mental images, sequence events, and make connections between different elements of the text.

• Guided Imagery: Engage students in guided imagery exercises where they close their eyes, listen to a passage being read aloud, and visualise the unfolding events in their minds. This multisensory approach can deepen their understanding and engagement with the text.

• Drawing Activities: Incorporate drawing activities where students sketch scenes, characters, or key moments from the text based on their visualisations. 

• Visualisation Prompts: Provide students with visualisation prompts, such as "Picture in your mind..." or "Imagine yourself in the story..." to prompt them to create mental images while reading.

• Comparing Visualisations: Encourage students to share their visualisations with peers, compare their mental images, and discuss how different interpretations can enhance their understanding of the text.

• Visualisation Journals: Have students keep visualisation journals where they record their mental images, reflections, and connections to the text. Encourage them to revisit and revise their visualisations as they progress through the reading.

Visualisation can be a powerful tool that students can use to immerse themselves in the text and enhance their reading comprehension through the power of mental imagery.

That rounds up all the Super Six reading comprehension strategies that you can incorporate into your classroom which will benefit your students not only in your class, but also in almost every academic endeavour they undertake.

Conclusion

The Super Six reading comprehension strategies offer a comprehensive framework for enhancing reading comprehension skills and engendering a deeper engagement with texts.

By incorporating the six strategies (making connections, monitoring, predicting, summarising, questioning, and visualising) you can help your students become active, critical readers who approach texts with curiosity, purpose, and empathy. So embrace the power of the Super Six and unlock the hidden potential of your students.