Comprehension Instruction – Comp Literacy Resources

Comprehension Instruction:
Teaching Students to Read with Comprehension at One Level Higher

Reading with Comprehension is the ultimate purpose of all reading instruction. We want students to be able to extract information independently from a text, so that they can find the information they need.

Please note: Comprehension Instruction is also sometimes called Anchor Read Apply or Guided Reading.

For early conventional students we should have a focus on reading comprehension from texts, using Australian Curriculum Foundation as our guide. Australian Curriculum has a list of skills that students should be able to do at each level, and we can use these as purposes for reading the book e.g. describe the characters, describe the setting, suggest a title, etc. Each of these contributes to or requires comprehension of the text. For example, being able to suggest an alternative title for a text requires comprehension of the text.

Always remember that comprehension instruction is about the student’s reading comprehension. The student needs to read the book and extract the information – and then practice doing that repeatedly with different texts to improve their reading comprehension.

Click to download poster. Created July 2021.

As mentioned above, Australian Curriculum English, provides information about what students should be able to do with texts at different grade levels. You can use this as your guide for comprehension instruction planning.

The resource below provides a series of reading comprehension purposes for students at Australian Curriculum V9, Foundation. They can be used as a record of comprehension instruction as well.

For your daily comprehension lessons you will need:

a book of the week at, or below, your students’ reading comprehension level, one copy for each student
5 reading purposes for the week taken from the appropriate level in Australian Curriculum

When reading a text with a focus on comprehension we would read it through without stopping to discuss it in any way. If there is anything in the text that you need to explain to the student(s), please do this before reading the book – or afterwards if needed. If you need to stop to explain items in the text repeatedly then the text is probably too difficult for the student.

The handout below provides an example of a week of comprehension instruction with students who are at Foundation. It takes you through a week of planning with a simple Foundation level text. Each day of the week, the teacher introduces the purpose for reading and then explains any information that students may need to extract the information from the text e.g. explaining what a mammal is before reading a text about mammals. Many Foundation students aren’t yet reading fluently or independently, and so we use a gradual release of responsibility model, aimed at having the students reading the text independently by the end of the week.

Click to Download. Updated September 2026.

By the time a student is at a grade 1 reading level, we want them doing comprehension with books they read – but at foundation level the teacher can read the majority of the text at the beginning of the week, and the students start joining in as the week progresses. It’s really important that this block involves the students’ reading the text and extracting the information, even if you have to progress to them reading the text through the week. We also need to make sure we activate any background knowledge that is needed to understand the text before reading the book e.g. explaining what a mammal is before reading a text about mammals. You don’t want to interrupt the reading with these explanations as it takes the emphasis away from comprehension.

It is also important that the student responds on the topic. In shared reading, we follow the student’s lead – but in comprehension instruction the student needs to learn to follow ours. The topic circle below from Laura Valerio has been a very valuable tool for visualising the concept of being “on-topic” or “off-topic”.

Click on topic circle to download (created June 2020)

And to assist with selecting books at or below the student’s reading comprehension level, please use the Reading Levels Correlation Chart below. You can use the conventional assessment results for a student to determine what level of text and purposes you should be using. If you would like to determine their level within their grade level, you could use the Cloze Assessment process in the Assessment Resources to determine this.