Retelling

Talking about reading material has shown to have a positive effect on reading comprehension. Therefore, an appropriate comprehension enhancement technique is retelling of the important aspects of the material read. Children become better storytellers, and it allows the teachers to see how well the children understand the reading selection.

Steps to be followed:

1. Students are paired with partners in this activity.
2. Students should silently read a section from a text.
3. One child retells what have been read, while the other listens.
4. Tellers and listeners alternate.

References:
Roe, B. D. , Smith, S. H. & Burns, P. C. (2005) . Teaching Reading in Today's Elementary Schools ( 9th ed.) . New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Maze Procedure

The maze procedure, a modification of the cloze procedure, requires the reader to choose from alternatives rather than to fill in a blank.

Maze tests are consrtucted as follows:

1. Teacher should select an appropriate text.
2. First and last sentence should be left intact.
3. Beginning with the second sentence, every fifth and tenth word is deleted.
4. Three alternatives are offered. One choice is the corrcet word, another is a word that is syntactically acceptable but sematically unacceptable, the final choice is both syntactically and sematically acceptable.

References:
Roe, B. D. , Smith, S. H. & Burns, P. C. (2005) . Teaching Reading in Today's Elementary Schools ( 9th ed.) . New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Cloze Procedure

The cloze procedure is an instructional strategy that can also be used as a tool to assess student comprehension.

Cloze tests are constructed as follows:

1. Select a passage of approximately 250 words that the students havn't read before.
2. Type the passage, leaving the first sentence intact and deleting every fifth word thereafter. Substitute blanks of uniform length in place of the deleted word. Then leave the last sentence intact.
3. Give the students the passage and tell them to fill in the blanks. Allow the time needed.
4. Score the test by counting as correct only the exact words that were in the original text. Determine the percentage of correct answers.

References:
Roe, B. D. , Smith, S. H. & Burns, P. C. (2005) . Teaching Reading in Today's Elementary Schools ( 9th ed.) . New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Image taken from the same book (above) by screen shot.