The act of making predictions and inferences while reading a narrative text is an important strategy for comprehension. By inferring meaning based on the information directly provided by the text, readers are able to gain deeper insights into the story. This strategy can be integrated into the classroom by periodically calling on students to make predictions regarding specific characters and events, or to explain why a character acted in a certain way. This can be done as an individual writing exercise or as a group discussion. Individual writing requires each student to rely on his own understanding of the text, while group discussions allow students to integrate the ideas of others into their personal understanding. This makes both teaching methods valuable, and neither should be neglected.
Monitoring is the ability of a reader to realize that the story as he understands it has become nonsensical or disjointed. This may be the intentional result of an unreliable narrator in more advanced works, but is generally the result of a failure in comprehension. By monitoring their own understanding of a narrative text, readers can be trained to recognize the need to re-evaluate their understanding or re-read a section of text. This ability can be honed through reading exercises in which students are required to read intentionally nonsensical passages and point out the elements which defy comprehension. As with inference exercises, both individual and group activities are valuable in teaching this strategy.
Summarizing a narrative text requires the reader to recall and condense the key events and elements of the text. This is an important comprehension strategy, as it encourages the ability to construct complex narrative structures from memory and can lead to new connections being made between different ideas and elements of the text. Summarizing is often aided in the classroom through the construction of story maps -- a sort of flow chart showing the important elements of the story and how they relate to one another. Requiring students to create their own story maps and update them as the text progresses is a good way to hone their skills at summarizing narrative texts.
The ability to create questions which apply to an ongoing text encourages readers to analyze the structure of the story and identify gaps in their own understanding. Once these gaps are identified, the information that fills these gaps will stand out much more strongly, and the reader is more likely to pick up on it and make the required connections to answer their own questions. In the classroom, question generation can be handled in much the same way as drawing inferences. Students can be periodically required to generate questions pertaining to the narrative text, demonstrating their abilities to analyze the text so far and priming them to make connections in future readings.