improve students’ reading comprehension skills in french Immersion
Have you ever taught a student who can read a text aloud with amazing fluency, but when you ask the student what the text is about, there are crickets? This has happened to me plenty of times. As educators, this experience may be frustrating and confusing. You know that reading comprehension is an integral part of reading and you cannot let students move on to read more difficult texts if they cannot comprehend what they are reading. You want your students to succeed and they are halfway there, but how do you get them to the finish line?
When teaching a student to read, there are several different aspects to cover: phonics, fluency, phonemic awareness, vocabulary and reading comprehension. I consider reading comprehension to be among the most difficult for students to grasp, as it requires your students to not only understand the words, sentences and contexts in which they are used but also to add personal opinions and make deductions that require an understanding beyond the text, in many cases.
So, how do you teach this? And where do you start? How can you track improvement? Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. Continue reading to learn 6 ways that you can improve the reading comprehension skills of every child in your class with simple techniques!
1. Start with vocabulary
Vocabulary acquisition is imperative when learning another language. It may sound simple, but students will never understand the text if they cannot understand more than 70% of the words on the page! How can you teach students vocabulary? Here are a few ways:
a) Label everything in your classroom. From the class door to the teacher’s desk, add a label so that they are easy to identify. As students begin to see these labels daily, the words will stick with them and you’ll notice them asking you less and less about how to say certain words.
b) Use word walls, sound walls and personal dictionaries. Providing students with resources to assist them in independently using French words is key.
c) Introduce fun word activities. You can introduce various vocabulary-building activities in your classroom such as dictées, word of the day activities or even play fun vocabulary games such as “Bandeau” (Get access to this game in my freebie library here) . These activities work as a great morning work activity in primary or junior classrooms. It is important to use repetition and practice when introducing your students to new words.
d) Incorporate simple songs in the classroom. This is especially useful in primary French Immersion classrooms. Introduce students to French music that has a simple yet catchy tune with relevant vocabulary. When you find songs related to a theme or season, play that song repeatedly and allow it to get stuck in students’ heads. Go over the song’s meaning with students so they understand it. Students will sing the song long after being in your class and may even introduce it to friends or family. This is a great way to contextualize and create a love of French!
e) Use theme days and thematic units. Using theme days in your class is an excellent way for students to learn relevant vocabulary while providing them with an authentic French experience. For example, you can teach a “restaurant” unit, with the end goal of having students order successfully at a restaurant or create their own French restaurant. With this goal in mind, students will have to learn relevant vocabulary through conversations and creating lists. With repetitive use, these new words will be incorporated into their everyday speech!
2. Ensure correct reading levels/ reading ability
This is always a tough and frequently debated topic. Should reading levels exist? Well, that’s a complicated answer that could be a whole other blog post. The short answer is that no matter what system you are using to determine your students’ reading ability, you need a concrete way to measure where the student is at and their improvement. I don’t like to focus so much on levels as I do on skills. Can they rhyme and detect rhyme, can they accurately identify les sons composés in a text? Can they decode? Do they understand the basics of phonics? Read more about how to teach phonics in the French Immersion classroom here. It is important that these fundamental skills are assessed correctly in order to ensure that students can read properly and are being provided with a text that corresponds with their reading ability. Frustrated students will often give up when a text is too hard, and when a text is too easy, students do not learn any new information.
Can’t find a reading assessment tool that accurately measures the essential skills that your students need to be successful readers? Click here to get this French Reading Assessment Tool with over 24 assessments included!
3. Incorporate independent reading
Independent reading is a very quick and simple routine that can be implemented into your daily schedule. I like to schedule independent reading after a loud and busy activity such as physical activity, lunch or recess times. For about 15-20 minutes (depending on your age group you can start with smaller increments of time and work your way up to this time), students choose a book from the class or school library and read. This is a great way to foster the love of reading for your students and provide them with daily reading time which is imperative to reading improvement. Many students do not have the opportunity to read each day at home, so incorporating this time into their school day is very helpful! This also allows you to see the types of books that students are interested in. You can incorporate these books into everyday reading activities to keep students interested.
4. Practice Inferencing in different contexts
Inferencing is a vital skill in reading comprehension, no matter the age. Inferencing is drawing conclusions from evidence in the text and prior knowledge. It is essentially “reading between the lines”. This is a skill that can be developed at an early age and is important to continue with more complex questions as students get older. The Question Matrix by Chuck Weiderhold is a great way to delve into more complex questions that promote inferencing.
This Question Matrix can be incorporated into read-aloud discussions with your class, or later on when practicing short answer questions after reading a story.
Inferencing not only shows that students understand the text, but they can relate the text to their lives and learn something from it. Start with asking students questions that force them to make predictions and then continue with more complex questions that begin with “why” or “how might” to incorporate a personal opinion and think outside of the box.
You can also practice inferencing with younger students or beginners by providing them with picture prompts. Based on the clues within the photo presented, ask what is happening in the photo, how did the characters get to where they are, what are they doing, etc. It is important to practice inferencing regularly to ensure that students are thinking critically when reading.
5. Model through discussion and reflection.
Reading aloud is excellent for modelling reading fluency, but also for practicing reading comprehension. You can occasionally pause while reading and ask your students to make predictions or summarize the page that you have read. You can ask students what they have learned about a character or if there was a lesson or moral in the story. These are great ways to informally practice reading comprehension skills. You can also use this as an opportunity to model how to make a prediction or to summarize a page, especially in the early stages of teaching your students reading comprehension skills.
6. Provide Regular Assessment and feedback
Once you have introduced your students to relevant vocabulary, modelled how to respond to questions, taught them valuable reading comprehension skills such as predicting and inferencing and assessed their reading skills, it is now time to put all of your hard work into practice: start assessing! Find simple reading comprehension texts that are at your students’ reading ability. Have them read the text independently and answer questions about the text. You may want to begin with texts that are paired with simple questions that are fact-based and can be found easily in the text.
Once the student has completed this reading comprehension, provide them with feedback. You can even send this home. When I was teaching, I would send home a reading comprehension evaluation about once a month, so that students and parents had an idea of where their child was at.
As the months continue, it is important to increase the complexity of the text and also change the style of the text as well. Provide fiction and non-fiction texts. Include questions that require inferencing, vocabulary knowledge and text-to-self analysis. Change up the format and provide short answer and long answer questions. This ensures that testing is accurate.
If you are wondering where you can find resources that check all of these boxes, check out this Mega Bundle of Reading Comprehension texts that includes 11 different writing styles and differentiated reading comprehension questions. This resource is sure to last you the entire school year and includes rubrics for each style of text, perfect for providing regular assessments for your parents and students.
Not sure what to expect? Check out this FREE Autobiography Reading Comprehension to test it out first!
Remember when following these tips that it is important to be patient and provide a supportive environment for learning. Improving reading comprehension is a long game that requires patience, consistency and support. Consistent practice and reinforcement of these strategies will contribute to improved reading comprehension skills in your French immersion program.
Good luck!