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Technique |
How... |
| 1 |
Even more so than with grammar, people need to learn inferencing and other comprehension skills through experience.
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Encourage the children you tutor to read every day! Ask them to tell you about what they read since the last time. Take them to the library on campus. |
| 2 |
Learning these ways of conveying meaning is reinforced through using it personally.
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Engage the child in writing activities. Ask them to write at home and go over the results together. Use a text editor to outline and start writing and proofreading. |
| 3 |
Once you understand something, it's hard to understand how sometimes. Asking the questions by grade on the main page may help you to diagnose a child's problems with understanding.
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Once you have a hypothesis about what is inhibiting the child's comprehension, try to test it by finding or constructing test texts. |
| 4 |
One of the very first steps in comprehension is realizing what you don't understand! Periodically ask about the meanings of paragraphs and sections.
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Use the guidelines by grade to help the child to gain comprehension strength. Make it a game by explaining that you will occasionally ask. If the child doesn't understand something, it is 'free' to ask. But if they haven;t asked and you ask a question they can't answer, they pay a point. |
See the chapter on Text Editors.
