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Catering for difference in reading comprehension

English Stars 19/5/23

While comprehension is an essential literacy skill, it is one that can be challenging to teach. As no two students have the same reading ability, gathering a wide range of high-quality texts to engage and challenge each one of your students can be no easy feat.

That’s where English Stars (available for Years 3 to 6) makes it easy! The comprehension modules come with a range of features designed to help you cater for your students’ individual needs and abilities.

Projectable comprehension texts

Project and read the comprehension text as a class to spark meaningful discussions. Encourage students to ask questions so you can check their understanding before getting them to work through activity questions independently.

Every English Stars text is fully projectable, giving you the ability to guide groups of students through the text and scaffold their understanding while your more confident students read the text independently.

Almost all comprehension modules begin with a ‘Discuss the artwork’ slide. Encouraging students to read the imagery allows them to positively engage with the text from the outset, and instills confidence early on. This is particularly encouraging for students who aren’t the most confident readers.

Printable comprehension texts

Printable comprehension texts are a fantastic tool that can be used to support student understanding and build comprehension skills. The tool gives students the opportunity to highlight, annotate and break the texts into smaller, more manageable chunks.

The printable comprehension texts allow students to unpack each text and identify the important information either individually or in groups. What’s more, they’re a handy reference for students to have as they answer the related comprehension questions.

Texts that play to their interests

There are many ways for your students to experience success with English Stars, and enjoying texts that play to their interests is just one of them.

Use the Text Reference Sheet to select texts that you know your students will love. This will allow students to build their confidence before they move on to more challenging texts.

If you’ve got students who are not-so-confident readers, choose one of the many comprehension units that use video instead of written text!

Tip: When you purchase English Stars, you get access to all year levels (Years 3 to 6). You can easily print comprehension texts and activities from other year levels to cater for students with different needs and abilities.

Built-in differentiation with three different question types

It can be intimidating for students to communicate their understanding of texts by answering questions. That’s why English Stars structures comprehension questions in a way that supports, then builds upon, student understanding.

Students are guided through three types of questions, starting with questions about simple details, then building to questions that help students make connections and inferences about the text.

Students start by answering literal questions about the text that allow them to consolidate and demonstrate their understanding of straightforward events or facts.

Then students move on to inferential questions that require them to think more deeply about the text. Students are supported to use contextual clues to make logical inferences.

Finally, students answer applied questions that encourage higher-order thinking and require them to draw upon their own experiences to evaluate the text.

The three types of questions enable you to target students of different abilities where they’re at, then build and extend their comprehension skills. As the teacher, you can choose whether students complete these questions online (with automatic marking) or offline using the printable worksheets.

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