Improve Reading Comprehension With Science of Reading Teaching Strategies

Imagine how frustrating it can feel for students who can sound out the words on a page but don’t understand what they’ve read. In these cases, students may lack critical reading comprehension skills or the ability to understand and make meaning from words. To read proficiently, students must apply decoding skills, vocabulary, background knowledge, and critical thinking strategies to construct meaning from a text. Reading comprehension challenges can be difficult for teachers to identify because they rarely stem from a single cause. However, with the right resources and strategies, students can develop strong reading comprehension. 

What Is Reading Comprehension Difficulty?

While strong reading comprehension is the goal of reading instruction, it’s just one piece of the process. To become proficient readers, students must apply multiple skill components, including decoding, word recognition, vocabulary, and background knowledge. 

The Simple View of Reading

The skills required for strong reading comprehension can be broken down following the Simple View of Reading. According to Philip Gough and William Tunmer’s (1986) Simple View of Reading (SVR), reading comprehension is achieved through the combination of two skills: word recognition and language comprehension. As the equation shows, neither of these concepts is sufficient on its own. If students fail to understand one half of the equation, they may not be able to read proficiently. 

Struggling with any of these subcomponents can lead to reading comprehension difficulties.

Before students develop reading comprehension skills, they must master word recognition and language comprehension skills.

Word recognition, or decoding, consists of these skill components: 

• Phonology: Understanding the sound system of a language, including how sounds are organized and used.

• Orthography: Recognizing the written system of a language, including spelling patterns and letter-sound correspondences.

• Morphology: Identifying the structure of words, including prefixes, suffixes, and root words.

Language comprehension consists of these skill components: 

• Syntax: The set of rules governing the arrangement of words in sentences to convey meaning.

• Semantics: The meaning of words and sentences, including vocabulary and how meaning is constructed.

• Pragmatics: Using language in social contexts and understanding rules for effective communication.

• Discourse: The structure of connected language, such as conversations, stories, or written texts.

Reading comprehension breaks down when students lack skills in word recognition or language comprehension. The science of reading emphasizes that strong reading comprehension emerges when teachers guide students through both areas step by step with explicit, systematic instruction.

6 Common Challenges Readers Face

Some students may accurately sound out and recognize words but fail to grasp what they’ve read. That’s because comprehension draws on multiple literacy skills at once. When any one of these skills is weak, it can keep students from making meaning from text and applying it across content areas. Here are six of the most common challenges teachers encounter in the classroom, along with strategies to address them.

1. Limited Vocabulary or Background Knowledge

Students who lack a strong vocabulary or relevant background knowledge may not attach meaning, or the right meaning, to words. For example, a student might read the sentence, “The cell’s walls helped it maintain its structure.” However, for students without science background knowledge, a “cell” could refer to a prison cell or cell phone rather than a biological cell. Teachers can help students understand multiple meanings of words by teaching vocabulary explicitly, following vocabulary development strategies, and helping students connect new information to what they already know.

2. Weak Oral Language or Inferencing Skills

Comprehension requires students to be able to “read between the lines” to infer meaning from a passage or text. Those students with underdeveloped oral language or inferencing skills often miss implied meaning, humor, or other context clues. Multilingual students or students with oral language weaknesses are more likely to encounter reading difficulties than their peers. By including rich discussion in lessons and modeling how to draw conclusions from context clues, teachers can help students develop these deeper reasoning skills.

3. Difficulty Decoding Words

Students who lack skills in phonics, phonological awareness, or sight recognition often find reading slow and effortful. Because they must sound out each word they read, they have little cognitive energy left for comprehension. Students are then unable to derive meaning from a passage if it becomes a decoding exercise. Before addressing reading comprehension, teachers should address decoding skills through explicit, systematic phonics instruction.

4. Poor Working Memory or Processing Difficulties

Reading comprehension involves juggling several cognitive tasks at once: decoding words, remembering details, making connections, and predicting what comes next. A student with working memory or processing challenges may read a paragraph accurately but forget its content by the time they reach the end. Providing graphic organizers, breaking text into smaller chunks, and teaching students to pause and summarize what they’ve already read can help reduce cognitive overload and improve retention.

5. Attention, Motivation, and Emotional Barriers

Even students with strong decoding and vocabulary skills can find it challenging to stay focused. Factors such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety, or a lack of engagement with reading material are all reasons students may lose motivation to read. Similarly, students who have experienced repeated reading difficulties may develop negative attitudes toward reading. Creating a supportive environment, offering choice in reading materials, and celebrating small successes are all ways teachers can help them overcome these barriers and restore confidence.

6. Decoding-Strong, But Meaning-Faint (Hyperlexia or S-RCD)

Some students read fluently on the surface but lack comprehension, a condition sometimes referred to as hyperlexia or specific reading comprehension deficit (S-RCD). These learners may even appear to be advanced readers because they read fluently, often at a young age. Yet, when teachers ask them to summarize or explain what they’ve read, they are unable to do so. Hyperlexia or S-RCD arises from a gap between word recognition skills and language comprehension skills. For example, a student might be able to pronounce the word “photosynthesis” but fail to explain what plants actually do with sunlight after reading a passage.

How To Support Students With Comprehension Difficulties

Teachers can apply multiple intervention strategies to help students who may need to improve reading comprehension skills, regardless of their current skill level in other areas of literacy. By guiding students through the process of reading comprehension, teachers can help their students make the jump from learning to read to reading to learn.

Build Vocabulary & Background Knowledge

Research shows that background knowledge strongly predicts comprehension performance and helps students make inferences as texts grow more complex. Students cannot make meaning from words and concepts they don’t recognize. Teachers can pre-teach word groups (for example, science terms related to ecosystems), introduce topic frames that give context before reading, and provide explicit instruction in high-utility words. 

Teach Comprehension Strategies Explicitly

A meta-analysis by the National Reading Panel concluded that direct instruction in comprehension strategies is one of the most effective ways to improve reading outcomes. Good readers must employ summarizing, questioning, and visualizing strategies simultaneously as they read. Struggling readers benefit when teachers model, practice, and reinforce these concepts through direct instruction. For instance, teachers need to guide students to identify a main idea or ask themselves questions while reading.

Model Deep Thinking With ‘Think-Alouds’ and Text Structure Instruction

When teachers verbalize their own thought process as they read, pausing mid-reading to ask the class, “This clue makes me think the character is about to …” students see how to derive meaning from what they’ve read. Similarly, teaching text structures (for example, cause-effect, problem-solution, chronological order) helps students anticipate and organize information.

Use Engaging, Relevant Texts to Boost Motivation

Students are more likely to persist when texts relate to their interests and cultural backgrounds. Teachers should give students choices, assign texts with high-interest topics, and incorporate stories that include diverse perspectives. Student engagement helps sustain attention, which is essential for comprehension. Guthrie & Wigfield (2000) demonstrated that motivation and engagement are strongly linked to reading achievement, especially when texts are relevant to students’ lives.

Support Working Memory Load With Prompts and Scaffolded Reading

Swanson & O’Connor (2009) found that strategic scaffolds significantly improved comprehension in students with learning difficulties. For students with limited working memory, graphic organizers, guiding questions in the margin, and breaking texts into smaller sections with pauses for discussion reduce cognitive strain. For example, Venn diagrams, storyboards, mind maps, cause-and-effect charts, story maps, and other scaffolds help students visualize the key concepts of a text and connect them to one another.

Lexia® Core5® Reading provides all students in grades pre-K–5 with a systematic and structured approach to all six areas of reading, including comprehension. By working through strands that address phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, structural analysis, and automaticity/fluency, Core5 gives each student a personalized learning path through adaptive placement and scaffolded activities that allow students to overcome reading comprehension issues.

How Lexia Addresses Comprehension Challenges

Core5 is structured around six strands of literacy instruction that align with the five essential components of reading identified by the National Reading Panel, plus oral language. These strands address:

• Phonological Awareness. Focuses on hearing and manipulating the sounds of spoken language (rhyming, segmenting, blending sounds) and builds the foundation for decoding and spelling.

• Phonics. Teaches students the relationship between letters and sounds, helping them decode words. Moves from simple to more complex spelling patterns.

• Structural Analysis. Expands on phonics to include advanced word study. Helps students read multisyllabic words by breaking them into meaningful parts (prefixes, suffixes, roots).

• Fluency. Helps students develop automatic word recognition and expressive reading. Supports comprehension by reducing the cognitive load of decoding.

• Vocabulary. Grows students’ word knowledge through direct and indirect instruction. Strengthens understanding of word meanings in context.

• Comprehension. Builds strategies for understanding and interpreting text. Includes literal, inferential, and critical comprehension skills.

Explicit instruction in each of these six strands ensures students develop both the foundational reading skills (phonics, phonological awareness, structural analysis, fluency) and the higher-level language skills (vocabulary, comprehension) to become confident, proficient readers.

Core5 Reading Comprehension Strand

The goal of the comprehension strand of Core5 is to build a student’s language comprehension skills and print awareness through listening activities and modeled readings. Through structured strategy, vocabulary reinforcement, and comprehension reinforcement activities, students learn to become proficient readers.

• Students listen to stories as they think about key features, including the title and author, the sequence of events, and the main idea and key details. This teaches developing readers about the structure of text and provides a framework for later reading comprehension. 

• In more advanced levels, students learn to use context clues by analyzing pictures as they begin to develop imaging skills. Once word-reading skills emerge, students are asked to associate decodable words and phrases with pictures, reinforcing comprehension at the word level. Students then engage more deeply with the structure of language as they sequence sentences within a story and then words within a sentence. 

• Later, students are asked to think about the components of a sentence by attending to question words that identify key parts of a sentence (for example, “Who is the sentence about?”) These activities engage students with language as they ask them to apply critical thinking skills. Students maintain their understanding of language structure as they learn how words function in sentences and how sentences can be expanded to add precision and detail. 

• As they move through the program, students apply skills independently to read and comprehend multiparagraph texts that represent a wide variety of genres and present a range of thought-provoking topics. 

Through scaffolded tasks, frequent practice opportunities, and adaptive progression, students build comprehension strategies throughout time, allowing them to revisit strands until they meet grade-level expectations. Because students may progress more quickly through some strands than others, Core5 uses Adaptive Blended Learning and embedded assessments to assess students’ skills in each strand and adjust instruction accordingly. Core5 uses built-in Assessment Without Testing® checks, which respect students’ time and provide usage recommendations to teachers based on individual needs. At the same time, these embedded assessments give teachers data and resources to personalize instruction.

Help Students Overcome Reading Comprehension Issues

Research shows reading comprehension challenges can be overcome with explicit, evidence-based instruction. Discover how literacy solutions like Core5 break down the complex process of reading by systematically building oral language, decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension skills.