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Best-practice comprehension teaching with Susan Taylor

Research shows that a consistent, strategic approach is the key to successfully developing comprehension skills.

Join educator and literacy specialist Susan Taylor in this five-part video series as she explores comprehension strategies and skills that your students can utilise to become successful readers. Throughout this series you will learn about:

  • the research behind comprehension development
  • developing your students’ comprehension strategies and skills
  • explicitly teaching and modelling comprehension strategies in the classroom
  • supporting your students’ comprehension development
  • monitoring your students’ comprehension development

Strategies and tips presented in this series can be applied in any classroom. Oxford Reading for Comprehension resources have been used throughout for demonstration.

Professional Learning Videos

Video 1: The research behind comprehension development

Explore the research behind comprehension development and learn about best-practice comprehension teaching in the classroom. This video also looks at the essential elements of effectively teaching reading instruction, focusing on vocabulary learning and language development, consistency with comprehension instruction, explicit teaching and modelling, and metacognitive strategies.

Video 2: Developing your students' comprehension strategies and skills

Learn about comprehension strategies and skills and how they are linked and convergent. Explore the key strategies that successful readers use as they read to construct meaning and develop understanding, and discover the Comprehension Skills Framework that underpins Oxford Reading for Comprehension as supported by comprehension development research.

Video 3: Explicit teaching and modelling of comprehension strategies in the classroom

Explicit teaching and modelling in the classroom plays an important role in developing comprehension strategies and skills in your students. Discover how you can implement this approach in the classroom in a consistent and interactive way, and learn how you can use a gradual release model to guide and reinforce the development of your students’ comprehension strategies and skills.

Video 4: Supporting comprehension development in your classroom

Using the approach of explicit teaching and modelling, learn how you can focus on comprehension strategies at the start of a guided reading session to further reinforce student comprehension and explore ways to help your students start using their comprehensions skills during a reading session.

Video 5: Monitoring Comprehension Development

Explore the ways you can monitor your students' use of comprehension strategies and skills, and learn how you can collect data on your students’ comprehension development. Discover the importance of ongoing monitoring and learn how you can use this information to inform your teaching and improve your students' reading and comprehension outcomes.

OXFORD READING FOR COMPREHENSION

Oxford Reading for Comprehension is a research-based guided reading program that explicitly develops comprehension skills for Years F–3.

With Oxford Reading for Comprehension, students learn to be active, engaged readers with the help of 290 full-colour engaging fiction and non-fiction books featuring captivating characters and stories designed to appeal to young Australians. Every text supports the teaching of one of the seven comprehension strategies from the Comprehension Skills Framework.

Learn More

HAVE YOU READ OUR FREE COMPREHENSION WHITEPAPER?
A guide to the research on best-practice comprehension teaching in today’s world

At Oxford, we believe a consistent approach to teaching comprehension as part of your overall literacy instruction will help address the comprehension challenge. To support schools to achieve this we have developed a guide to the research on best-practice teaching of comprehension in today’s world.

Download now

Meet the Expert


Susan Taylor is an experienced primary school teacher who also lectures and facilitates tutorials for pre-service primary teachers at Macquarie University. Her specialty subjects are literacy, language and literature. She is also the series expert for Oxford’s series, Oxford Reading for Comprehension, and co-author of the Oxford Reading for Comprehension Teacher Handbook.

Request a consultation

Complete this form and your local Oxford Education Consultant will contact you at a convenient time to discuss Oxford Reading for Comprehension.