Practice Guide for Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies
The complete content of this practice guide is currently available in Arabic only. Please switch the language to view it.
Fifty-three percent of children in Jordan experience learning poverty, defined as the percentage of ten-year-olds who are unable to read and understand a short, age-appropriate text. Why might this be the case?
As teachers, we all recognize that reading is the gateway to learning other forms of knowledge. Once students are able to decode words, spell them, and understand their meanings, they begin an engaging journey of learning. This ability does not only help them read Arabic language lessons—it also enables them to understand mathematics problems, learn about scientists, explore history, and much more.
Evidence suggests that developing reading comprehRead more
ension can help students make the equivalent of six additional months of academic progress over the course of a year. To achieve this, learning activities must be carefully designed to match students’ reading abilities, incorporating texts and tasks that present a meaningful challenge—one that students can successfully overcome.In light of this, we are prompted to reflect carefully on how we can strengthen students’ reading comprehension skills to help them move forward in their learning.
Explore the Teaching and Learning Toolkit and the research summaries on reading comprehension strategies.
You can also watch Video 1: A discussion session on the Teaching and Learning Toolkit and how to use it.
What does this guide include?
This practice guide focuses on developing reading comprehension strategies for students aged 6–12 in primary education. However, it may also be useful for teachers working with younger or older students. Teachers may find the recommendations helpful for older students who struggle with understanding texts, as well as younger students who are progressing rapidly in reading and comprehension.
The guide presents four key recommendations, focusing on evidence-informed teaching approaches and strategies that teachers can use with their students.
Each recommendation begins with a brief reflective scenario, illustrating common challenges teachers face and representing current classroom practices. This helps place the research evidence within a realistic teaching context.
Following this, the guide introduces the questions that the recommendation seeks to address, outlines the key ideas behind it, and provides practical classroom approaches and strategies describing “what might work in the classroom.” These are demonstrated through a variety of examples, along with answers to common questions teachers often raise in this context.
This guide draws primarily on the guidance report developed by the Education Endowment Foundation, known for its leading work in reviewing global research on effective educational practices across different contexts. It also incorporates our own analysis and review of both international and Arabic research on approaches that may work effectively in our local and regional context.
In addition, we drew from well-known educational platforms that provide classroom models—such as Reading Rockets—and resources designed for Arabic language teachers. These resources were adapted to fit the local and Arab educational context.
You will also notice that some examples in the guide draw on experiences shared by teachers in Jordan during professional development workshops organized by the foundation. We hope to further enrich this guide with case studies from Arab schools as they become available.
Who is this guide for?
This guide is intended for primary schools and providers of both formal and supplementary education. It is also relevant for classroom teachers and school leaders responsible for designing and implementing school-level teaching policies.
Although the guide focuses primarily on Arabic language instruction, its recommendations extend to all subjects taught in Arabic, offering strategies that can benefit a wide range of teaching contexts.
The guide may also be valuable for policy makers, parents, program developers, educational researchers, and education leaders interested in improving reading comprehension.
What message does this guide emphasize?
This guide highlights several important messages for teachers—working in collaboration with and supported by their school leadership:
- Prioritize pre-reading and reading comprehension development to ensure that students can understand and analyze texts deeply. This includes providing activities, classroom practices, and interactions that expand students’ vocabulary and prepare them for reading.
- Explicitly teach strategies and skills that support reading comprehension, helping students gradually develop independence in understanding and analyzing texts.
What do we hope to achieve through this guide?
We hope that teachers and education stakeholders will find in this guide practical support for strengthening their understanding of evidence-based reading comprehension strategies.
This understanding can help them make informed decisions about how to equip students with these strategies and how best to apply them in the classroom.
We believe that teachers are best positioned to determine the most appropriate approaches, adapting them according to their classroom contexts, available resources, professional judgment, and knowledge of their students.
In our efforts to strengthen students’ reading comprehension, we emphasize the importance of enabling them to use the right strategies and approaches. Our aim is to develop independent readers who can distinguish between different types of texts and apply suitable strategies to understand, analyze, and critique them.
Achieving this requires creating a stimulating learning environment where students can explore, experiment, and discover. Such an environment supports our vision of preparing learners who are able to manage their own learning effectively and independently.
What should we consider at the classroom and school levels?
Before examining the recommendations, it is important to acknowledge a key challenge associated with reading comprehension: many students struggle to understand written texts and extract implicit meanings.
Students often find it difficult to infer ideas and connect them with one another. This difficulty frequently stems from challenges in decoding words, understanding language structures, or grasping unfamiliar vocabulary.
For this reason, teachers need to use a wide range of strategies and teaching approaches, introducing them to students explicitly and consistently, while providing the necessary support that enables students to apply these strategies independently across different reading tasks and subject contexts.
Teachers should also take into account differences in students’ reading levels by assessing and exploring their abilities in order to select appropriate reading materials.
Based on this assessment, teachers can design targeted activities that help students acquire reading comprehension strategies and apply them to a variety of texts.
At the school level, schools should develop a comprehensive plan—created collaboratively with teachers—to strengthen students’ reading skills, while also providing teachers with professional development on the latest evidence-based classroom practices to ensure continuous improvement in students’ learning outcomes.
What is reading comprehension?
Reading comprehension is a complex process that relies on students’ cognitive abilities and essential reading skills. It is expressed through the ability to extract meaning from written text, which is the fundamental goal of reading.
This process often occurs through an interaction between the reader and the author of the text. It begins with decoding words and progresses toward connecting them with the reader’s prior knowledge in order to understand the deeper meaning of the text.
The ultimate goal is to enable students to develop techniques and skills that allow them to move from decoding words to interpreting and understanding texts, helping them infer meaning, connect ideas, and become more motivated to read.
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