How to Improve Reading Comprehension: Methods That Work

For most adults, reading comprehension improves through three things: knowing more about the subject and its vocabulary, reading with a question in mind, and testing yourself on what you read instead of simply reading it again. Previewing a text and explaining it to yourself as you go also help. None of these is a trick; each one gives your mind more to connect new information to, or makes you do the connecting.

What reading comprehension depends on

Fluent adult readers rarely struggle to recognise the words. Where comprehension breaks down is in building meaning from them, and that depends on:

• Background knowledge. The more you already know about a topic, the more easily new sentences fit into place. In a classic study by Recht and Leslie (1988), students who knew a lot about baseball but were weaker readers remembered and reconstructed a passage about a baseball game better than stronger readers who knew little about the game.
• Vocabulary. Every unknown word is a small hole in the sentence. A few you can guess from context; many in a row and the meaning collapses.
• Attention. Reading while thinking about something else is one of the commonest causes of poor comprehension. See how to focus while reading.
• Active processing. Comprehension is something you do, not something that happens to you. Asking why, linking ideas and putting them into your own words is what turns words into understanding.

Knowledge is the strongest lever. If a text feels impenetrable, reading a simpler introduction to the same subject first often helps more than reading the hard text twice.

Which comprehension strategies does the evidence support?

The most cited summary is a 2013 review by Dunlosky and colleagues in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. They rated ten common learning techniques by how well the evidence supports them across learners, materials and situations. Their ratings concern learning and remembering, which is what most people mean by comprehension when they want to use what they read.

"Low" does not mean useless. The review found that summarising helps some readers on some tasks, and a second reading of a hard passage can be exactly right. The point is that the most popular habits, highlighting and rereading, are not the most effective ones.

How to improve reading comprehension: a step-by-step method

Before you read: preview and set a purpose

1. Spend one to two minutes on the title, headings, first and last paragraphs, and any figures or summaries. This is skimming used as a map.
2. Write two or three questions you expect the text to answer. They give your reading a target.
3. Note any terms you do not know and look up the ones that appear in headings; they are usually the ones the rest of the text depends on.

While you read: explain it to yourself

At the end of each section or every few paragraphs, stop and ask: what was the point, how does it connect to the previous section, and why does the author think so? Answer in a sentence or two, in your head or on paper. If you cannot, that is your signal to slow down or look back, not to press on.

Looking back is part of reading well. An experiment by Schotter, Tran and Rayner (2014) found that comprehension dropped when readers were prevented from re-reading earlier words. The kind of re-reading worth cutting is the habitual sort, covered in regression in reading.

After you read: test yourself

Close the text and write or say everything you remember, then check it against the original and fill the gaps. This is retrieval practice, and it is the single best-supported habit on the list. In a study by Roediger and Karpicke (2006), students who read a prose passage and then practised recalling it remembered more two days and one week later than students who spent the same time re-reading it, even though the re-readers felt more confident.

Later: recall again

For anything you need to keep, repeat the recall a day later and again a week later, from memory first and the text second. Five minutes each time is enough. This is distributed practice, the other technique rated high.

Build knowledge and vocabulary over time

Strategies help you get more out of one text. Knowledge and vocabulary make every future text easier, and they build only through reading itself.

• Read around a subject. Three or four books or long articles on one topic do more for your understanding of the fourth than scattered reading does.
• Start easier, then step up. An introductory book before a specialist one is not a shortcut; it is how the specialist one becomes readable.
• Collect words properly. When a word blocks a sentence, look it up, note the sentence it came from, and review the list weekly.

Why slowing down is sometimes the right answer

Speed and comprehension trade off. The 2016 review of speed reading by Rayner and colleagues concludes that when readers move through text faster than their normal pace, they understand less, and that claims of large speed gains without loss do not hold up. So if a contract, a textbook chapter or a research paper is not going in, the fix is often to read it more slowly, with more stops to explain it to yourself. Skilled readers do this all the time: they speed up on familiar material and slow down on dense or important passages.

The opposite is also true. Not every text deserves full comprehension. If you only need the gist of a report, a fast skim at a fraction of the time is a better use of your attention than careful reading of every line.

How speed and comprehension fit together

A useful way to keep yourself honest is effective reading speed: your words per minute multiplied by the share of comprehension questions you answer correctly. It is a practical convention, not a standardised scientific measure, but it shows the trade-off clearly.

In this example, reading nearly twice as fast bought nothing: the extra words came with lost understanding. Tachi's free reading speed test reports your words per minute, your comprehension score and your effective speed together, so you can see where your own balance sits. More on measuring well is in how to test your reading speed.

How to practise: a four-week plan

Twenty to thirty minutes, four or five days a week, on the kind of text you actually need to understand. This is a practical routine built from the techniques above, not a tested programme.

1. Week 1: baseline and recall. Take the reading speed test once. Then, for each session, preview for two minutes, read, and finish with a closed-book recall of five minutes. Check your recall against the text.
2. Week 2: add self-explanation. Stop at every section break and explain the point and how it connects to the last section in one or two sentences.
3. Week 3: space it.Begin each session with a three-minute recall of the previous session's reading before starting new material.
4. Week 4: re-measure. Take the test again on a different passage. Compare comprehension first and speed second. A higher effective speed with the same raw speed is a good result.

If you read on a screen and want a steady pace while you practise, a paced reader can hold you at your chosen speed and pause whenever you stop to explain a section to yourself.

If comprehension problems go with slow, effortful word reading that has always been there, an assessment for dyslexia will help more than any strategy here. For the wider picture on speed, see does speed reading work? and the short answers in the FAQ.