Encourage your students to discuss a passage or story they have read in small groups. Provide a prompt sheet or some questions to start them off. Help the children learn from each other, each bringing their own perspective and experience to the text in question.
Break texts down into chapters, pages, paragraphs, or even sentences if you need to. Read (or have students read) the passage and then ask questions about what has happened. Ask your students what they think will happen next, which characters they like or dislike and why, and what they like about the story so far.
Encourage your students to use a dictionary to look up the meanings of any words they are unsure about and then to use this word correctly. Look up meanings yourself to show students that there is nothing wrong with not understanding a word at first. When reading to the class, occasionally ask them the meaning of a word and then have a student look up the meaning in a dictionary for you.
Encourage students to self assess their comprehension. Have them make up a quiz with a group of other students about various aspects of a book that the whole class has read. Let them consolidate their understanding by thinking about the questions and being sure of the answers. Then have teams quiz each other, with points scored for the most correct answers.
Write the main events of a story on strips of card. Laminate the strips and give them out. Have students work together to get the story back together in the correct order. Stop occasionally in this process to have students read the strips as they are laid out to see if the story makes sense. Ask students to continue working together until they think the story is in the correct order, and then have students read the strips of card aloud to check for themselves.
Give students the opportunity to act out stories and events from books to consolidate comprehension. Have students act out scenes, chapters or put on a performance of a whole book or play. Let students play characters to help them understand motivations and learn how events affect characters and how a character's actions make the story develop.