Some texts have higher cohesion than others. The high-cohesion texts help students understand the content. The low-cohesion texts expect the students to know a lot about the subject and the text tends to use jargon. The low-cohesion texts also lack clear goals regarding what they seek to accomplish. Even students with low reading comprehension skills have an easy time reading texts that contain information with which they are familiar. Choose texts suitable for the reading levels of the students so they are not bored with easy texts and overly challenged by difficult texts. You can introduce students to increasingly challenging texts to build up their reading comprehension skills.
Narratives are stories that can be either fictional, such as a fantasy story, or nonfictional, such as a historical narrative. Teachers often use narratives to teach students story elements, such as plot and character. You can give students vocabulary words related to narratives and can have students incorporate these elements into their own stories. According to Liberty University's Kristen Ephraim, state standards often require these story elements.
Part of reading comprehension involves critical thinking. Narratives have ripe opportunities for teachers to help students learn to think critically. You can ask students why characters act in a certain way. You can also ask students to think about the rhetorical decisions the writer made when creating the story, such as the setting.
You can have students map out the character goals and can then have the students map out how the characters reach their goals. Mapping out decisions made by characters forces students to critically think about the story, rather than accepting the story at face value. Plus, students need reading comprehension skills to analyze characters' decisions.
You can help students improve both their creativity and reading comprehension by retelling or parodying stories they read. They can take a historical story and create a modern adaption, retell a story through fictional newspaper articles or put on a play that makes fun of certain aspects of the story. Retelling or parodying a story accurately requires the students to comprehend the story enough to adapt it while still retaining elements of the original.