Reading Comprehension Strategies: Classroom Routines

Reading comprehension strategies are the deliberate moves a reader makes to build meaning from a text and to repair it when understanding breaks down. The five taught most often are predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarising and activating prior knowledge. They work best when a teacher models them on a real text, then hands them over bit by bit.

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What are reading comprehension strategies?

A reading comprehension strategy is a choice the reader makes on purpose, such as stopping to reread a sentence that did not make sense. A skill runs without thought, such as reading a familiar word by sight. Strategies matter most when a text is hard, because that is when meaning slips.

Comprehension happens inside the head, so a teacher sees it only through what learners say or write. That is why strategy teaching leans on talk. A learner who can explain why they reread a paragraph is showing you the strategy at work.

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) guidance for Key Stage 2 names five strategies to model and practise (EEF, 2021). Its Key Stage 1 guidance puts language, phonics and fluent reading first (EEF, 2020), and its secondary guidance asks every subject to teach the reading its texts demand (EEF, 2019). For the primary picture in more depth, see our guide to reading comprehension in the primary classroom.

The flow chart below places each strategy at the moment in the reading where it does its job.

Read the chart as a sequence for teaching, not a script for every text. A short poem may need only clarifying and a summary, while a long information text may need all five. Our wider guide to comprehension in reading covers the question types learners meet once they can use these moves.

The prompt sheet below puts the five strategies on one printable page, with the words to use when you model each one and a short plan for your next lesson.

Pin a copy by your desk for the first few weeks. Once the moves feel natural, the sheet becomes a planning check rather than a script.

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Why decoding alone does not build understanding

The simple view of reading explains why some fluent readers still do not understand. Gough and Tunmer (1986) described reading comprehension as the product of decoding and language comprehension. If either is close to zero, understanding is close to zero too. Hoover and Gough (1990) tested the idea with readers in the early grades and found the two parts together explained most of the differences in comprehension.

You can read more in our guides to Gough and Tunmer's framework and to using the simple view in the classroom. Scarborough's reading rope splits the two parts into strands, such as vocabulary, background knowledge and verbal reasoning.

Comprehension strategies sit on the language side. Castles, Rastle and Nation (2018) argue that learners must first become fluent at recognising words, which frees attention for meaning. Duke and Cartwright (2021) add that active self-regulation, including strategy use, links decoding and language, so strategies are part of reading rather than an extra. Our guide to the science of reading sets out the wider debate.

Knowledge matters as much as technique. In a classic study, weaker readers who knew a lot about baseball remembered a baseball text better than stronger readers who knew little about it (Recht and Leslie, 1988). Strategies help a reader use what they know. They cannot supply knowledge that is not there, which is why teaching tier 2 and tier 3 vocabulary belongs in every comprehension plan.

Fluency is the other gate. A learner who spends all their effort on each word has no working memory left for meaning. If a learner reads slowly and without expression, start with reading fluency strategies such as echo reading, then add strategy teaching.

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How do you teach reading comprehension strategies?

Each strategy below has a job, a teacher move and a check. Teach one at a time at first, on a text the class is already reading for a reason. Then show learners how to combine them, because the EEF guidance says integrated strategies work better than any one used alone (EEF, 2021).

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Predicting

Learners use the title, pictures and first lines to say what might happen or what they will learn. The value is not a correct guess. It is that learners then read to check. Ask: "What makes you think that?" and return to the prediction after reading. A good check is whether learners change their prediction when the text gives them a reason.

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Questioning

Learners ask their own questions about the text, then look for the answers. Start with questions whose answers sit in one sentence, then move to questions that need two parts of the text joined. That second kind is where inference and deduction begin. A review of 26 studies found that teaching learners to generate questions improved comprehension, with larger effects on the researchers' own tests than on standardised ones (Rosenshine, Meister and Chapman, 1996).

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Clarifying

Learners notice a word, phrase or sentence that stops meaning, then fix it. Teach three fix-ups: reread the sentence, read on to the end of the paragraph, and use the words around the gap. Model it aloud: "I don't know what 'billeted' means. The next line says the children lived with families in the village, so it must mean housed." Clarifying is the strategy teachers post about least, so it is often the one learners get least practice in.

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Summarising

Learners say the main idea of a section in one or two sentences and leave the detail out. Give a word limit, such as twelve words for a paragraph, so learners have to choose. A graphic organiser helps here, because it shows how the ideas connect. For struggling readers, main idea, text structure and retelling taught together looked the most effective combination in a review of 52 studies (Peng et al., 2024).

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Activating prior knowledge

Before reading, learners say what they already know about the topic and what they expect the text to cover. Keep it short and accurate. Correct a misconception before reading, or learners will read the text through it. If the class knows little, teach the key facts first rather than asking them to guess.

One more move runs under all five: monitoring. Learners notice when the text stops making sense and pick a strategy to repair it. This is metacognition applied to reading, and it is the real aim of strategy teaching.

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Model the strategy, then hand it over

Learners need to know three things about each strategy: what it is, how to use it, and why and when to use it (EEF, 2021). The best way to show all three is a think-aloud, where you read a short passage and say your thinking out loud. It makes an invisible process visible, and it lowers the cognitive load of guessing what good readers do.

Then release the strategy in stages. You model it, the class practises with you, pairs practise while you listen, and learners use it alone on a new text. This follows the steps in Rosenshine's principles of instruction: small steps, models, guided practice and checks for understanding (Rosenshine, 2012). See our guides to modelling learning and scaffolding for how to fade the support.

The generator below writes a think-aloud script for a genre, a reading challenge and a year group. Use it to plan what you will say before you model.

Read the script aloud once before the lesson and cut anything that sounds unlike you. A think-aloud works when it is short, honest and tied to a real problem in the text, such as a word you had to work out.

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Reciprocal teaching: four roles on one text

Reciprocal teaching is the best-known way to practise several strategies together. Palincsar and Brown (1984) designed it so that a teacher and small group take turns leading a discussion of a text, using four moves: predict, question, clarify and summarise. The teacher models each move first, then hands the leading role to learners.

It has the strongest research record of any comprehension routine. A review of 16 studies found a median effect size of 0.32 on standardised comprehension tests and 0.88 on tests the researchers wrote (Rosenshine and Meister, 1994). The gap between those two numbers matters: gains on the texts learners practised on are larger than gains on new texts.

The EEF tested a version called Reciprocal Reading in English primary schools. It ran as 20 to 30 minute sessions over 12 weeks, and each learner practised all four roles rather than keeping one job (EEF, 2021). The targeted version, for Year 5 and Year 6 learners (Grades 4 and 5) who could read the words but struggled to understand, improved comprehension (g = 0.18). The whole-class version for Year 4 (Grade 3) showed no significant effect (O'Hare et al., 2023).

So use reciprocal teaching as a small-group routine for learners who decode well but do not understand, and keep the roles rotating. Our reciprocal reading guide has role cards and group set-up. Dialogic reading is the younger relative, built for shared picture-book reading with an adult.

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Worked examples at two phases

The same five moves look different in Year 3 and Year 9 (US Grades 2 and 8). Here is what each lesson sounds like.

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Year 3 (Grade 2): a short story read as a class

The class reads a story about a fox that gets into a school garden. Before reading, the teacher shows the cover and asks: "What do we know about foxes? What might a fox want in a garden?" Learners say foxes look for food at night, and predict that the fox wants the vegetables. The teacher writes both predictions on the board.

During reading, the teacher stops at "The fox slunk past the shed." She says: "I'm not sure what 'slunk' means. The fox is trying not to be seen, so I think it means crept quietly." Pairs then find one more word to clarify on the next page. After reading, each pair writes a summary of twelve words or fewer, and the class checks it against the predictions.

The check at the end is simple: can a learner explain how they worked out a word? If most can, the next text uses the same move with less modelling.

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Year 9 (Grade 8): a history textbook section

The class reads two pages on the causes of the First World War. Before reading, the teacher asks what learners remember about the alliances from last lesson, and fixes one error: Britain was not in an alliance with Germany. Learners skim the headings and predict which cause the author will treat as most important.

During reading, pairs write two questions that the text answers and one it does not. The teacher models summarising a paragraph in one sentence that names a cause and its effect. This is disciplinary literacy: the strategy is the same, but a historian's summary must keep cause, effect and evidence together.

The check is a new paragraph from a different textbook. If learners can summarise it with a cause and an effect, the strategy has transferred.

For a quick reference on planning and assessing these lessons, see our reading records template, which helps you note which strategies each learner uses without prompting.

The next section looks at how schools organise reading lessons, and at the routines teachers describe.

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Whole-class reading, groups and who reads aloud

Many primary schools have moved from a carousel of guided reading groups to whole-class reading, where everyone works on one shared text. The appeal is that every learner hears the same modelling, and adult time can go to those who need it. Guided reading still has a place for small groups with a specific need.

Classroom posts rarely show a full four-strategy scheme. They show one move on today's book, such as a prediction from the cover or a line retrieved from the text. The table below collects four of them.

The evidence matches this shift in one way and warns against it in another. The EEF trial found the whole-class version of Reciprocal Reading did no better than usual teaching, while targeted groups gained (O'Hare et al., 2023). So a whole-class model needs a separate slot for learners who can decode but still do not understand.

Who reads aloud is the other live question. Choral reading, echo reading and partner reading keep every learner on the text. Asking a weak reader to read alone in front of the class does little for their understanding and can make them dread reading.

A simple rule covers most of this: you read the hard parts, the class reads together, and individuals read aloud when they choose to. Our guide to shared reading has more routines for reading a text together.

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Does comprehension strategy teaching work?

Yes on average, but the size of the effect depends on how it is taught and how it is measured. The EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit rates reading comprehension strategies at about seven months of additional progress, from 184 studies, at very low cost, and rates the security of that evidence as moderate (EEF, n.d.). Our guide to the EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit explains how to read these figures.

Meta-analyses give a closer view. Across 64 studies of struggling readers aged about 8 to 18, comprehension interventions had an effect of g = 0.59, and background knowledge and strategy teaching both raised the effect (Filderman et al., 2022). Across 52 studies of whole-class strategy teaching, the effect was d = 0.186 on standardised tests and d = 0.431 on researcher tests (Okkinga, van Steensel, van Gelderen, van Schooten, et al., 2018). Effects were larger when researchers taught the lessons than when teachers did.

The evidence check below asks one question of eight studies: does explicitly teaching comprehension strategies improve learners' reading comprehension?

The bar counts only the eight studies checked for this guide, not every study on the topic. Three points stand out. Standardised test gains are about half the size of gains on researchers' own tests or smaller. Delivery matters: a year of whole-class reciprocal teaching with 369 low-achieving 13 year olds had no overall effect, and helped only where teachers gave high-quality strategy instruction (Okkinga, van Steensel, van Gelderen, & Sleegers, 2018). And knowledge matters: in one two-year study, open questions about the content of the text beat strategy instruction on recall and learning (McKeown, Beck and Blake, 2009).

Text structure is a strategy with its own evidence. A meta-analysis of 45 studies found that teaching learners how expository texts are organised improved their comprehension of those texts, with bigger effects when more structures were taught and when writing was included (Hebert et al., 2016). Transfer to general reading tests was small and inconsistent.

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Choose texts and build knowledge first

Strategy lessons fail most often because the text is wrong: too easy to need a strategy, or so hard that no strategy can rescue it. The EEF advises texts at the right level of challenge, and practice that makes learners want to read (EEF, n.d.). Pick texts that teach something you want the class to know, so the reading builds knowledge as well as technique.

The evidence panel below summarises three sources behind this advice: the EEF Toolkit, a review of comprehension instruction, and a US practice guide for the early years of primary.

Two routines help most. Pre-teach the three or four words the text cannot be understood without, and give a short knowledge input before a hard text. Programmes such as Word Aware, Story Champs and Visualizing and Verbalizing make vocabulary, story structure and mental imagery explicit in different ways. Keep time for reading for pleasure too, because learners who read widely meet far more words and ideas.

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Support learners who struggle to understand

Start by finding out why a learner struggles. The EEF says accurate diagnosis is especially important for older struggling readers (EEF, n.d.). Listen to the learner read a short passage, then ask them to retell it. If they cannot read the words, the priority is decoding and fluency. If they read well but cannot retell, the priority is language, knowledge and strategies.

For the second group, small-group teaching has the clearest evidence. Targeted Reciprocal Reading improved comprehension where the whole-class version did not (O'Hare et al., 2023), and across primary reading interventions for learners at risk the average effect was 0.39 (Gersten et al., 2020). Keep groups short and regular, and review progress after a set number of weeks. Our guide to progress monitoring shows simple ways to track it.

The selector below suggests reading strategies by key stage, focus and reading level. Use it to pick a starting point, then check the result against what you see in the learner's reading.

If a learner's difficulties persist after good teaching and targeted support, talk to your SENCO. Our guides to supporting learners with dyslexia and dyslexia tests and support explain the school processes.

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What the evidence does not support

Strategy teaching is not a replacement for knowledge. When a text's topic is unfamiliar, no amount of predicting will fill the gap, and content-focused discussion can beat strategy drills (McKeown, Beck and Blake, 2009). Effects for struggling readers held only when background knowledge was also taught (Peng et al., 2024).

More strategies are not better. The same review found that teaching more strategies did not always raise the effect, and no single strategy was best (Peng et al., 2024). Longer is not better either: the EEF notes that structured interventions of up to ten weeks tend to be more successful than longer ones (EEF, 2021).

A scheme of texts with set written questions is not strategy teaching. The EEF describes a school that bought one and saw little change, because questions test comprehension without showing learners how to comprehend (EEF, 2021).

Researcher tests flatter the results. The gap between 0.88 and 0.32 in the reciprocal teaching review, and between 0.431 and 0.186 in the whole-class review, is the gap between practised texts and new ones. Judge your own teaching on a new text. Most of the research comes from the United States and other English-speaking countries, and some named results rest on single studies, such as a trial of 210 primary learners in Germany (Spörer, Brunstein and Kieschke, 2009).

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Literacy guides on this site

This page is the hub for our literacy guides. Each group below links to the full guide on that topic, so you can move from comprehension to the part of reading you need next.

Reading models and the science of reading

• science of reading
• theories of reading
• Simple View of Reading in the classroom
• Gough and Tunmer's Simple View of Reading
• Scarborough's Reading Rope
• top-down and bottom-up processing
• literacy pedagogy
• literacy frameworks

Phonics and early reading

• phonological awareness activities
• Phase 1 phonics
• Jolly Phonics
• Sounds-Write
• Read Write Inc
• Year 1 phonics screening check
• high frequency words
• Cued Articulation

Comprehension and fluency

• comprehension skills
• reading comprehension in the primary classroom
• inference and deduction
• reading fluency strategies
• echo reading

Classroom reading routines

• reciprocal reading
• guided reading
• whole class reading
• dialogic reading
• reading for pleasure

Vocabulary and language

• Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary
• Word Aware
• language learning for refugee learners

Writing

• modelled, shared, guided and independent writing
• nonfiction writing
• writing frames
• building better sentences
• essay plans
• Everybody Writes
• Silent Solo
• Letter-join

Literacy across the curriculum

• disciplinary literacy
• extended writing in biology

Assessment, intervention and dyslexia

• progress monitoring
• Star Assessments
• precision teaching
• supporting dyslexic learners
• reading records
• Fountas and Pinnell

Programmes and apps reviewed

• Reading Eggs
• Reading Plus
• Oxford Owl
• PhonicsPlay
• SpellingFrame

Related guides in other areas

• Shared Reading Strategies
• Literature Circles and Book Talk
• Colourful Semantics
• Language Development
• Language Development Theories
• Talk for Writing
• Pedagogy for Teaching

If you are new to the topic, start with the simple view of reading, then fluency, then this page. That order follows the way understanding is built.

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Frequently asked questions

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What are the 5 reading comprehension strategies?

The five in the EEF Key Stage 2 guidance are predicting, questioning, clarifying, summarising and activating prior knowledge. Reciprocal teaching uses the first four as rotating roles.

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What are the 7 reading comprehension strategies?

Lists of seven usually come from the US National Reading Panel (2000), which found seven single strategies with a firm research base: comprehension monitoring, cooperative learning, graphic and semantic organisers, story structure, question answering, question generation and summarisation. They overlap heavily with the EEF five.

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What is the difference between reading skills and reading strategies?

A skill runs automatically, such as recognising a familiar word. A strategy is a deliberate choice, such as rereading a confusing sentence. With practice, some strategies become so quick they work like skills.

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How long should comprehension strategy teaching last?

Keep it brief and regular. The EEF notes that structured interventions of up to ten weeks tend to work better than longer ones, and the Reciprocal Reading programme it tested ran for 12 weeks of 20 to 30 minute sessions.

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Do comprehension strategies help secondary learners?

Yes. The EEF Toolkit finds the approach effective in both primary and secondary schools, and whole-class effects were larger in grades 6 to 8 (Okkinga, van Steensel, van Gelderen, van Schooten, et al., 2018). In secondary, teach strategies inside each subject's texts.

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Is whole-class reading better than guided reading?

There is no trial that settles it. The EEF found whole-class Reciprocal Reading no better than usual teaching, while targeted groups gained. Many schools combine a whole-class text with small-group time for learners who need it.

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What is the simple view of reading?

It says reading comprehension is the product of decoding and language comprehension (Gough and Tunmer, 1986). A learner needs both, so strategy teaching cannot make up for weak decoding.

Try one strategy with one text next week. Choose predicting or clarifying, model it in a two-minute think-aloud, let pairs practise on the next page, and check whether learners use it unprompted on a new text the week after.

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References

Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5-51. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100618772271

Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25-S44. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411

EEF (Education Endowment Foundation). (2019). Improving literacy in secondary schools: Guidance report. EEF.

EEF (Education Endowment Foundation). (2020). Improving literacy in key stage 1: Guidance report (2nd ed.). EEF.

EEF (Education Endowment Foundation). (n.d.). Reading comprehension strategies. Teaching and Learning Toolkit strand, review last updated October 2025. EEF.

EEF (Education Endowment Foundation). (2021). Improving literacy in key stage 2: Guidance report (2nd ed.). EEF.

Filderman, M. J., Austin, C. R., Boucher, A. N., O'Donnell, K., & Swanson, E. A. (2022). A meta-analysis of the effects of reading comprehension interventions on the reading comprehension outcomes of struggling readers in third through 12th grades. Exceptional Children, 88(2), 163-184. https://doi.org/10.1177/00144029211050860

Gersten, R., Haymond, K., Newman-Gonchar, R., Dimino, J., & Jayanthi, M. (2020). Meta-analysis of the impact of reading interventions for students in the primary grades. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 13(2), 401-427. https://doi.org/10.1080/19345747.2019.1689591

Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6-10. https://doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104

Hebert, M., Bohaty, J. J., Nelson, J. R., & Brown, J. (2016). The effects of text structure instruction on expository reading comprehension: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(5), 609-629. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000082

Hoover, W. A., & Gough, P. B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing, 2(2), 127-160. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00401799

McKeown, M. G., Beck, I. L., & Blake, R. G. K. (2009). Rethinking reading comprehension instruction: A comparison of instruction for strategies and content approaches. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(3), 218-253. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.44.3.1

National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Reports of the subgroups. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

O'Hare, L., Stark, P., Cockerill, M., Lloyd, K., McConnellogue, S., Gildea, A., Biggart, A., Bower, C., & Connolly, P. (2023). Comparing the effectiveness of two reciprocal reading comprehension interventions for primary school pupils in disadvantaged schools. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 93(4), 1123-1145. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12623

Okkinga, M., van Steensel, R., van Gelderen, A. J. S., van Schooten, E., Sleegers, P. J. C., & Arends, L. R. (2018). Effectiveness of reading-strategy interventions in whole classrooms: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 30(4), 1215-1239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-018-9445-7

Okkinga, M., van Steensel, R., van Gelderen, A. J. S., & Sleegers, P. J. C. (2018). Effects of reciprocal teaching on reading comprehension of low-achieving adolescents: The importance of specific teacher skills. Journal of Research in Reading, 41(1), 20-41. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12082

Palincsar, A. S., & Brown, A. L. (1984). Reciprocal teaching of comprehension-fostering and comprehension-monitoring activities. Cognition and Instruction, 1(2), 117-175. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532690xci0102_1

Peng, P., Wang, W., Filderman, M. J., Zhang, W., & Lin, L. (2024). The active ingredient in reading comprehension strategy intervention for struggling readers: A Bayesian network meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 94(2), 228-267. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543231171345

Recht, D. R., & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers' memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16-20. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.80.1.16

Rosenshine, B. (2012). Principles of instruction: Research-based strategies that all teachers should know. American Educator, 36(1), 12-19, 39.

Rosenshine, B., & Meister, C. (1994). Reciprocal teaching: A review of the research. Review of Educational Research, 64(4), 479-530. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543064004479

Rosenshine, B., Meister, C., & Chapman, S. (1996). Teaching students to generate questions: A review of the intervention studies. Review of Educational Research, 66(2), 181-221. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543066002181

Spörer, N., Brunstein, J. C., & Kieschke, U. (2009). Improving students' reading comprehension skills: Effects of strategy instruction and reciprocal teaching. Learning and Instruction, 19(3), 272-286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2008.05.003

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Further reading

• Oakhill, J., Cain, K., & Elbro, C. (2015). Understanding and teaching reading comprehension: A handbook. Routledge.
• Sweet, A. P., & Snow, C. E. (2003). Rethinking reading comprehension. Guilford Press.
• Wilhelm, J. D. (2001). Improving comprehension with think-aloud strategies. Scholastic Professional Books.