How To Improve Reading Comprehension ?

How to improve reading comprehension ?

Reading comprehension is a skill that is important in many ways for both adults and children. It is quite possible to develop an innate skill. Here’s what you need to know;

Reading Comprehension is defined as the ability to process text, understand its meaning, and make relation with what the person already knows about the area. It is basically understanding what you are reading. Even though the meaning of reading comprehension can be simple, the action is not simple to teach, learn, or practice.

Reading comprehension is an active, interactive process that occurs before, during, and after a person reads a writing or any reading related material. It is also one of the sharp corner of the act of reading. The reader deals with a multiple of complex processes while reading.

In order to understand the entire text, the reader must be able to understand the words used in the text or paragraph. If the individual words don’t make sense to reader, there won’t be proper reading comprehension and understanding.

Although it is possible to make inferences based on previous vocabulary, new words need to be learned. This is critical important for children’s reading comprehension. But more important is understanding the text rather than understanding the words.

The reader must be able to put and combine the words together to make general meaning and understanding of paragraph . For this, many different text comprehension strategies are used.

What Happens While Reading ?

You can be sure that trying to learn or to find about what’s going on during reading will help you better understand the importance of the skill. Because there are some actions that affect the brain positively during reading. Connections in the right and left parts of the brain are strengthened while the period of reading. At the same time, new connecting roads are going to be formed and created.

Throughout the reading process, the brain which improves both academic and emotional intelligence, decodes letters. Our eyes move over the lines and send the words to the center of the brain, where the information is processed and the symbols solved here to gain meaning.

During reading, our eyes make extremely quick movement into page. This movements are extremely fast for us to recognize. The meaning of the printed symbols is deciphered in short pauses and sent to our brain.

Our system is warned within the first 10 minutes of reading. The person moves to another dimension and neurological activities are activated into brain. After 20 minutes, these effects increase, the person imagines what they are reading and naturally feels like they are somewhere else. After some amount of period of time, the reader begins to feel the book completely as reality. And from this moment, there will be the most effective reading comprehension throughout all reading.

9 Strategies to Increase Reading Comprehension

1- Asking Right Question

This strategy involves the reader asking himself/herself some questions while reading the material. Asking the right questions as they read is particularly valuable in helping them integrate information, identify main ideas, summarize information, and keep the reading comprehension on top level. Asking the right questions allows to the good reader to focus on the most important informations in the paragraph.

You can ask these questions to yourself before reading or while reading;

For example;

Why am I reading this book ?

What benefits can this book give me ?

What can I get from this book for the exchange of my time ?

What are the Chapter Takeaways ? (Seriously, if the book you read have Chapter Takeaways, benefit from them as much as you can, they are the heart of reading)

What is the main idea goal of this book ?

You can ask thousands of question on yourself before beginning to read, but it is important to ask some questions before reading.

2- Deducing The Book

Reading requires the reader to evaluate or draw conclusions from the informations in the entire book or the reading material. After all, writers don’t always give full disclosure or provide explicit information about a topic, setting, character, event or conclusion at the end of the book.

But clues are hidden into the paragraphs of the books for the reader to make connections. It has been observed that when the reader is taught how to make inferences, they improve their ability to create meaning.

3- Prediction

It involves the reader’s ability to make conscious guesses and infer meaning from the paragraph. Good readers use their predictions as a way to connect their existing knowledge to get new information to make sense of what they read. These type of readers can make assumptions of what they exactly read.

For example, the reader can use his/her knowledge of the author to predict the content of the text before beginnig reading. Its title and chapters index can also enable to reader to get ideas from similarly titled texts that the reader has read before. It also helps to predict what the next step will be during reading.

4- Summarize

This strategy involves the ability to combine or synthesize information from the text so that the reader can explain in his/her own words what the text is about. Summarizing is an important strategy because it can make the reader remember the text quickly or it can also help the reader to remember exact book after years.

5- Visualization

It includes the ability to construct mental images of text or words as a way for the reader to process the informations while reading. It can be an indication that the reader understands the text. Some studies have already shown that readers who visualize while reading remember what they read better than those who do not visualize.

Note: If the book you read has Chapter Takeaways at the end of each Chapters, if you visualize the words from the Chapter Takeaways, you are going to be able to remember the entire book extremely easy. As a Speed Reading Coach, over the years of experiences, I created this reading and learning hack for myself.

6- Increasing Reading Speed

Increasing Reading Speed can help you to increase your Reading Comprehension. Most of readers read between 150-300 words per minute. However, human brain is designed to handle over 600 words per minute. During reading, human brain fills this area by distractions while reading. Because of reading low amount of words per minute, your reading ability gets affected negatively and you get disturbed. To not get disturbed while reading, you have to use the full capacity of your brain power, and this requires you to increase your Reading Speed. Increasing Reading Speed is easy with right and effective techniques. Please Check out our 21 Days Speed Reading Course.

With our Speed Reading Course help, you can triple your Reading Speed by only basic techniques. Plus, it helps you to increase your reading Comprehension as well. I have created every techniques on this course for myself, especially for my reading life. Once you increase the amounts of words per minute you read, your reading comprehension will be increased also in the long term. Please don’t forget that, to increase Reading Comprehension, you have to increase your Reading Speed.

7- Not Repeating The Same Page You Read

Most of the readers do this mistake while reading, and this affect our Reading Comprehension extremely negatively. During reading, please don’t try to read the past pages that you passed to read while reading the book. If you read that pages, and if you don’t understand or don’t remember what you read, please skip the past or move on next section.

If you repeat to read the same page you read to just understand much better or remember, your brain will repeat this problem again in the future, and this will cause your brain laziness for reading in the long term. Because you repeat one time, and you are going to want to repeat same situation over and over again. That will directly reduce your Reading Comprehension.

To increase our Reading Comprehension properly, we have to read one page on one time and no matter what happens, whether we understand what we read or not, we have to move on next page or chapter. With this tactique, your brain will learn how to focus much more on one time only.

8- Protecting Yourself From Atmosphere Distractions While Reading

During reading, we can get distracted from multiple factors easily. This is one of the most common problems amoung the all readers, because most of reader cannot focus fully and properly while reading.

You have to keep your focus, and attention level on top level. Depends on where you read, there can be always distraction while you read. For example; when you travel on the bus, there will be definetly a lot of noise amoung the people. And to benefit your time, if you decide to benefit to read on bus, it is likely that you are going to get distracted by noises.

On our 21 Days Speed Reading Course, we teach how you can protect yourself from these atmosphere distractions easily.

When you truly protect yourself from these atmosphere distractions while reading, you are going to be able to focus on your top level, because the noises won’t be able to bother you.

It is extremely important to protect yourself from atmosphere noises while reading to increase, and protect your reading comprehension.

9- Reading Everday

As a reader, no matter what happens, we have to read on everyday. We have to spend a regular time for reading on everyday. Reading must be our daily habit. Once we do this habit, your reading comprehension will be increased in the long term, because your brain gets adopted to read something on everyday. It is important to make reading as your comfortable habit for your brain.

When you read something on everyday, your brain won’t have difficulty to understand the texts, and paragraphs. Your understanding of reading material will be higher, and easier according your daily habit. Please don’t think that ‘’ you have to read hundreds of pages on everyday. ‘’ As Speed Reading Coach, I can guarantee that you don’t have to !

But you have to read at least five pages or ten pages per day. Even the amount of pages are low number of level, it is important to read something on everyday. Don’t focus to read high amount of pages per day, because it is likely that you will fail on the beginning of your reading journey. But make a baby steps. Even though five pages or ten pages are low numbers, they still matters, because action beats inaction ! You still read five or ten pages per day.