Students should be intentionally and explicitly taught comprehension skills that prepare them for reading. Students should be working on the following comprehension skills as outlined in the PowerPoint by Dr. Joan Bendix: Central theme, main ideas and supporting ideas, vocabulary, text structure, point of view, reasons and evidence, sequence of events, character development, and compare/contrast. Also outlined in the PowerPoint were the comprehension processes which are as follows: Making connections, asking questions, visualizing, inferring, determining importance, and synthesizing. These processes are outlined in the reading cycle as well (Bendix, 2022a). 

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The reading cycle is a lesson design that helps to guide readers through comprehending text. There are four primary parts of the reading cycle: Before reading, during reading, after reading, and response. In the before reading stage students are “frontloading”. Then teachers guide students to think intentionally and make connections in the “during reading” stage. After reading, students extend and synthesize what they have read. Then, at the end students respond to what they have read through writing (Bendix, 2022a). 

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Readability is how easy a text is to read. It can be measured in a variety of ways. Teachers may use the Flesch-Kincaid model or the RAYGOR model to gauge what level a book is. Teachers may use leveling to help readers find books that are at one’s independent or instructional reading levels. Other considerations for finding books for students include the book itself and its features, the content, themes, and ideas in the book, the text structure, and the literary elements (Bendix, 2022b).  

Text complexity is a general assessment of a text’s features. It has three interrelated components: qualitative, quantitative, and reader and task. Text structure is dependent on the genre of text. Genre is the general category in which a text can be placed in. Fiction is defined as a story or text that is not true. Inside that genre are subgenres such as fantasy, historical fiction, and fables. The structure for fiction for example would include a specific moral or theme. For nonfiction, an example of an element of text structure would be a table of contents. This is further outlined in the following PDF (Bendix, 2022d).