15 Techniques to Improve Reading Skills—In Any Subject

So, you’re here on our blog, ready to learn new sets of techniques for improving your students’ reading skills, which is only possible because you can read! This example wonderfully shows us how reading permeates all aspects of life. Although, essentially, children need to read fluently to obtain an education, good reading skills significantly increase the chances of finding employment and fully participating in our society or government, later in life. For these reasons, we know that teachers and homeschooling parents welcome every help they can get to improve reading skills in kids. 

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at some of the most effective techniques and include practical examples that you can utilize in the classroom or in a home setting. Depending on the grade-level of your students and the demands of the unit, you can choose which techniques would be most suitable for you to implement. Don’t feel pressured to try them all out! Instead, carefully select a few of them (maybe even one) and fully immerse them into the learning process, until the students turn them into a habit. 

The students’ character also plays a role, so don’t forget about individual differences. Some of these techniques will benefit some more than others. Always provide alternatives to students who still struggle while reading. 

Let’s begin. 

Effective Techniques to Improve Students’ Reading Skills

Typically the concept of reading skills can be interpreted in one of two ways. First, as a unitary process that refers to the ability to read. This is pretty straightforward and makes sense, however, in recent years, experts began talking about specific reading skills – plural. This is because reading is not viewed as a unitary process anymore, but it’s broken down into its main components. 

The main components of reading include phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and spelling. 

The consequences of viewing the process of reading as a set of different parts are that two students who struggle with reading might experience difficulties in different areas. They won’t benefit from one universal solution and require an individualistic approach. 

We look at reading as a complex process consisting of different skills, which is why the following techniques target these specific skills and you can easily choose a technique based on what exactly the student struggles with. 

Set Reading Goals

The first technique works best for students who can’t concentrate, lose motivation, or feel lost in a sea of information and don’t know how to organize the newly acquired information. 

Setting reading goals also works well in combination with the next technique – dividing the text into smaller portions. For instance, the student can divide the text into portions and set a specific goal for each paragraph. However, the final goal should always be to gradually start reading larger chunks of material. 

So, what would be an appropriate reading goal when we want the students to improve their reading skills? Here are some examples that children can use, depending on what they struggle with the most: 

• I’ll read more so I can learn to read faster. 
• I’ll read books on different topics (or more complex) so I can learn new words. 
• I’ll highlight and search for all the unfamiliar words I encounter. 
• I’ll make summaries and take notes of the key ideas, so I will remember the important stuff. 
• I’ll read more texts or books on one topic, so I can learn more advanced stuff. 
• I’ll read X books this month. (alternative: I’ll read one book this week). 
• I’ll read a text that’s larger than X without a pause. 

Setting goals will give children a clear idea of what they want to accomplish and what they need to do to get there. 

Divide the Text Into Portions

Dividing the text into portions is a pretty simple and straightforward technique that works best for beginners and children who are easily distracted. You can improve reading skills by building discipline or motivating students who are discouraged because they still lack the skills to read fluently. 

There are two things to keep in mind when dividing the text into smaller chunks. First, each section must be more or less independent of the previous or next section and make one point. Don’t cut off the text randomly. Dividing it based on its subheadings it’s a smart idea. 

Second, dividing the text works when it’s used as a tool for creating a habit and then progressing toward longer pieces. It won’t work if the child always reads 200-word texts, for example. And, this brings us to our next reading strategy – varying the length of the text.

Vary the Length of the Texts

It’s very interesting how easily our brain recognizes patterns and finds shortcuts to make things more economical – to waste less energy. Because of this principle, when we do one thing over and over again, the brain will recognize it as a pattern and will anticipate when to finish with that activity. Unfortunately, this anticipation is usually manifested as losing motivation toward the end, becoming restless and distracted, especially in children whose self-disciple isn’t their strong suit. 

You can start with smaller chunks and progress toward longer, but also throwing surprises here and there such as a very small reading piece, a picture book, an informative short section, or a long narrative. Now knowing what to expect will keep children on their toes, as they always must be prepared for a long read. 

Allow Choice Reading

What about children who don’t want to read? Well, the best way to make them interested in reading is to show them that reading helps them find out more about something they’re already interested in. A child who shows no interest in reading the assigned literature but is fascinated by drones or airplanes, for example, will most probably be interested in reading about the construction of the first drone or airplane. 

Realizing that reading is a tool that helps us find out how things work, how to approach problems, how to find solutions, will transform the way children look at the assigned reading materials. 

Utilize the Four Main Reading Techniques

Different tasks require different reading techniques, for optimized efficiency. Over time, researchers have identified four main types of reading techniques that people use in different situations. These techniques include skimming, scanning, intensive, and extensive reading. 

Once the child is comfortable with their reading skills and has no problem reading a text of different lengths, they can be introduced to these techniques so they can become more efficient in their academic assignments (that require reading a material). 

• Skimming – Skimming is a technique for quickly looking “over” the text to try to find out what’s the main point, or in other words, what’s the text about in its most basic form. This type of reading is suitable when students need to go over a list or a bunch of different texts to find something they’ve been looking for. Its main benefit is that it saves a lot of time.
• Scanning – This is a similar technique to skimming but it’s used on a much smaller scale. It’s also used when one’s looking for a piece of information or wants to find the right details, such as time, date, place, name of something, but it’s searching inside one text or paragraphs, not a whole book or magazine. Scanning means paying attention to each sentence, but without trying to take it in, unless it’s the sentence of interest. 
• Intensive – In contrast to skimming and scanning we have intensive reading, which, as the name suggests, means fully immersing oneself in the text, reading carefully word by word, figuring out the meaning, and taking notes. Studying for exams requires intensive reading. 
• Extensive –  Also known as free reading or book flood, extensive reading is a type of reading that occurs when students read something they find interesting or truly enjoy. That’s why is also called “reading for pleasure.” It’s characterized by zoning out (mentally excluding oneself from the environment), uninterrupted reading, and assimilating the information without consciously thinking about its meaning. This is a great exercise to practice language and improve reading skills. 

Assign Relevant Reading Material

Unfortunately, not all school material can be an extensive type of reading for students. In fact, most of the time it will be intensive reading, which is why teachers and homeschooling parents must do their best to keep children motivated and interested. Motivation is critical when we want to improve reading skills in kids.

A smart way to do this is to evoke curiosity. This can be done through personalizing the reading material or including material related to current events. Personalized content means assigning reading material that will make students identify with the story. On the other hand, using current events means assigning a reading about the COVID-19 effects on our body in a biology class, for example. 

Practice Vocabulary Words

Before you assign a new text or a more technical reading material, make sure to spend some time introducing new vocabulary words and practicing with interesting and relevant examples, so the topic can feel more familiar. 

This is a useful technique regardless of the grade the students’ are in or their reading skills. It’s always good to familiarize oneself with the technical jargon of a specific field of knowledge. 

If you’re teaching preschoolers, or elementary to middle-school students, then check out our vocabulary worksheet bundles, as, with only one click, you can get amazing exercises for a variety of topics. 

Identify Unfamiliar Words In the Beginning

Another useful technique related to vocabulary building as a way to improve reading skills in kids is briefly scanning the text and identifying new and unfamiliar words before beginning an intensive reading with a purpose to study. This is important because unfamiliar words are going to break the reading flow and interrupt the thinking process, which prolongs the reading and deteriorates the process of assimilating new information.

Teach the students to scan for new words, find the definitions, see examples of their use, and try to think of examples on their own, before beginning with an intensive reading of a new text. 

Practice Reading Comprehension Skills

Reading comprehension is an essential reading skill, which is why incorporating specific reading comprehension exercises is more than welcome. While it might seem like reading skills and reading comprehension is more or less the same thing, they’re not! Reading comprehension is just one component of reading that refers to the process of extracting the meaning from the text. It’s independent of encoding (recognizing words), which is why students with reading comprehension problems might read fluently, even though they don’t understand what they read.

In our article “How to Help Students With Reading Comprehension” we explained four different strategies that improve reading comprehension. Check them out.   

Annotate and Highlight the Text

Sometimes children struggle to follow the lines of text and lose their gaze which forces them to begin from the top or spend time searching where they’ve stopped. This takes a toll on the motivation, concentration, flow of information that affects assimilation, and the learning process in general. 

An easy way to solve the issue is for kids to make small notes on the side of the text, or use different colored markers and highlight important information. Not only will they be much more efficient in orientating in the body of the text, but they’ll also be able to quickly find important information when they revise or go back to check some information. 

Classify Information with Graphs and Maps

One can lose itself in the sea of information not just physically, but also mentally, especially if the text is large! Trying to figure out what was the main argument in the first, then second, then the third paragraph puts a big strain on the memory of adults, let alone children who’ve recently learned how to read. 

For these reasons, it is very useful if you teach students to take notes and try to organize them in bullet points, graphs, or even make maps with steps to something or connections between different concepts. 

Show students the principles of organizing texts in bullet points or graphs, but after that, let them figure it out and use their own creativity and way of imagining things. After all, these maps should make sense and serve only them. 

Visualize Processes

The above technique was a very rudimentary way of visualizing the written text, in order to understand it better. However, students can go way beyond that. When learning biology, for example, students can draw parts of the body based on the descriptions in the text, so they can remember these concepts easier. They can also try to draw some physiological process, or maybe how the Roman army was positioned when studying history, for example. There are no limitations to what the students can visualize in order to better understand the text and have a clearer picture of its meaning when reading it. 

Analyze and Summarise The Text Part by Part

Breaking the text down into smaller chunks because it’s overwhelming is a good tactic that we’ve already discussed, but students can also analyze and summarise each of these parts to see whether they’ve understood what they’ve just read. Summarising the material can be in written or oral form. 

Students can also summarise the material out loud and measure to see how effectively they’ve been reading. Do they remember the main idea? Do they remember the details? 

Make Room for Q&A

When you’re assigning a reading task, make sure to leave room for questions and/or a discussion once the reading is done. This is another effective way to get feedback on whether the students had problems with the text, how they handled these problems, whether they understood the main point (reading comprehension), and to what level their reading skills are.

Also, children who struggle can hear how others think about the text and learn new cognitive strategies they can apply next time they’re reading. 

Retelling the Story

Finally, the last reading technique is teaching students to retell the story once they finish reading. Similar to the Q&A session, by re-telling the story students can learn how effective their reading was, how much they understood the topic, and whether they need to go over it again. Usually, retelling the story in their own words is the most effective way for memorizing the new information without having to read it two or three times. 

Before You Leave 

More and more teachers realize the benefits of incorporating specific techniques to improve reading skills rather than focusing on only teaching the content. There’s an old saying that you probably already know, but it goes something like “Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you’ve fed him for a lifetime.” Well, by teaching kids some of these reading techniques, you’re giving them the tools and strategies they need to become avid readers who can handle any type of literature at any length in the future. They’ll know how to stay focused by setting up reading goals, how to be more effective by using different reading techniques for different purposes, to analyze and familiarize themselves with vocabulary words before analyzing the text, and so much more. 

Best of all, all these techniques are universal and can be used regardless of the subject area, just like our worksheet bundles you can find browsing through our main website. Alternatively, you can use our worksheets, facts, lesson plans, and curriculums from our reading section.

Check out our blog as well, as there are so many other tips for teachers and homeschooling parents and other insightful information about many aspects of children’s education.