Understanding what you read isn’t always easy. Do you ever find yourself re-reading a paragraph to try to comprehend what it said? If your concentration wanders, reading can be even more difficult.
One way to improve your reading comprehension is to actually spend some time doing some pre-reading activities. It can dramatically increase your understanding of what you’re reading.
1.) Read the title. Yes, it’s obvious, you’re going to read the title before you launch into a book or news article most of the time, but have you ever really taken a minute to think about what the title tells you about the content of what you’re going to read?
Write down words that come to mind when you read the title. This will get your mind ready to read words related to the topic and will help you to understand the relationships between ideas in the text.
What do you predict you’re going to read about? If it’s an opinion piece, what do you think the author’s stance will be?
2.) Look at the pictures. You can learn a lot about the content of an article or book just by looking at the graphics. If you’re learning a foreign language, think how much vocabulary you can learn just by looking at the pictures while you read! Read the captions if it is a non-fiction text.
Graphs, charts, and photos often have captions that tell you more about what is going on in the text. They are often used to highlight important information from the text. When your mind has already understood the graphics or pictures, it’ll be easier to make connections to the text when you actually read it.
3.) Read Subtitles and Paragraph Headings. After you read the title, read the subtitle and then the paragraph headings. The subtitle will give you a more detailed idea about what you’ll read. The paragraph headings are fantastic for helping you understand the structure of the text and in helping you figure out how the ideas in the text fit together as a whole.
4.) Skim. Read quickly through the article. Don’t read every sentence. Read the first and last sentences of each paragraph so that you get a general idea of what you’re about to read. You’ll have a good understanding of the main idea of the text just by completing the last steps. By skimming, you’ll start to better comprehend the details. Skimming shouldn’t take you too long to do, but of course, this also depends on the length of the text.
5.) Read. The last step is to actually read the text. All of the previous steps don’t really take that long to complete. We’re talking just a few minutes. In the end, however, they can significantly improve your understanding of and appreciation for the text in its entirety. It is just fine to re-read to improve your understanding, but you will likely have to do so less often when you take these pre-reading steps.