Teaching strategies to improve students’ vocabulary and text comprehension

Good readers use various comprehension strategies to understand texts. However, many students lack knowledge on how to purposefully and effectively use text comprehension strategies. In this experimental study, the effectiveness of teaching text comprehension strategies on vocabulary and text comprehension at literal, inferential and evaluative levels was evaluated among 257 sixth-grade students from 10 Estonian schools. Accordingly, skim reading, vocabulary building, monitoring, generating and answering questions, and identifying the main idea and summarising were taught by Estonian language teachers during a 3-month intervention period. Group-level analysis indicated that students in the experimental condition improved their vocabulary and text comprehension at all levels, whereas students from the control condition improved only their literal text comprehension. Individual-level analysis revealed that students in different profile groups of the experimental condition benefited from the intervention. However, in the control condition, only those students with average vocabulary and text comprehension increased their literal comprehension. As various strategies can improve students’ text comprehension at different levels, they should be included in the curriculum and reading lessons.