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"Reading Comprehension Strategies"
1. Definition
They are deliberate procedures and conscious plans used by readers to achieve a goal and solve problems of comprehension.
Reading comprehension strategies should be taught in combination and through modelling. The aim of a "Reading module" is to train students to use those strategies for comprehending different types of text. Remember that the purpose of reading implies a specific way of reading.

2. Reading Comprehension Strategies (PDP)
A. Pre-reading strategies:
Before they begin to read, EFL readers come with a purpose in mind which is primary. The following step is previewing the text, activating background knowledge, forming questions, predicting, and skimming. By doing so, learners will be prepared for reading the text.

Previewing
This strategy allows students to determine the general topic of the reading, relevant vocabulary (though not necessary for advanced learners), etc by examining distinguishing features of the text such as the title, subheadings, drawings, and illustrations.

Activating prior knowledge
It facilitates recall of students' stored information. It is an aid to better comprehension of the text, especially if students are provided with specific reading guides for texts. However, less background knowledge does not necessarily lead to miscomprehension, in that students with a high level of proficiency in EFL and with a limited background knowledge can learn more from a text than less-skilled ones.

Forming questions
Researchers argue that question-forming strategy, most of the time, requires training students in how to generate appropriate questions that relate to a text. This strategy improves ‘memory for text information, the identification of main ideas, and accuracy in answering questions.

Predicting
After the background knowledge has been activated and questions have been formed, the reader, then, predicts the content of the text by forming hypotheses. This strategy is used even during reading to anticipate the next chunk of language.

Skimming
The reader uses this strategy to identify the main idea of the text by having a glance at the first and last paragraphs, and the topic sentence of each paragraph.

Scanning
Scanning is a furing- reading strategy. It means looking quickly through the text but for a specific piece of information (names, dates, ...). The reader starts reading and once s/he finds the needed information, s/he looks at the surrounding text. If s/he gets what he is looking for, s/he stops reading. If not, s/he continues scanning until s/he spots that information.

B. During-Reading Strategies:
During reading, the EFL reader is engaged with the text by using both bottom-up and top-down strategies to comprehend the text at hand. The bottom-up strategies help in building sentence-by-sentence comprehension. The top-down ones assist the reader in comprehending large pieces of text such as a paragraph. In short, efficient reading involves both types of strategies whereby the reader moves from one to the other as s/he reads. Scanning can be also used as a post-reading strategy whereby students can have a glance at the text to look for a specific piece of information, with students having already read the text. Some of during-reading strategies are: inferencing and comprehension monitoring.

Inferencing
It is a very important and useful strategy to comprehension; in that, it permits the reader to retrieve the intended information by using what is mentioned in the text such as syntax, logical and and cultural clues, etc. Inferencing depends on the student’s prior knowledge, reading strategies, vocabulary knowledge, text-structure awareness and so on.

Comprehension Monitoring
It is a major reading strategy that improves comprehension. More than that, it is viewed as an important metacognitive process. This strategy implies many other strategies such as relating text to background knowledge, recognising text structure, etc.

Predicting
During reading, good readers anticipate the following paragraph and predict its main idea, before reading it, according to what is being said and dealt with in the present one.

Using Text Structure Awareness
It is a very useful and important strategy for making text comprehension and recall of information better. A number of researchers state that many studies dealing with expository prose have demonstrated that students who are aware of text structure and who utilise the resources of text structure in their summaries such as discourse-signaling systems which include, for instance, rhetorical patterns of organisation , improve their reading comprehension.

Other During-Reading Strategies
There are other strategies used during reading such as checking predictions, forming questions about the text, finding answers to posed questions, taking notes, skipping words, distinguishing main ideas from supporting details, distinguishing fact from opinion, connecting one part of the text to another, rereading, guessing the meaning of words from contexts, highlighting /underlining difficult parts of a text, and checking comprehension.

C. Post-Reading Strategies:
After reading and understanding a text, proficient EFL readers are able to paraphrase, summarise it in a form of a paragraph or in graphic organisers, evaluate the author’s point of view or make a personal response.

Summarising
Though there is scant research on the effect of this strategy on L2 (Second Language) reading, summarising leads students to better text comprehension. In studies conducted by a number of researchers, it has been found that summarisation training has led students to better summarising of reading texts, which reflects better texts comprehension.

Using Graphic Organisers
The use of graphic organisers, in L2 contexts, such as Venn diagrams, KWL charts, matrices and the like assists readers in recognising text structure and focus on main points and ideas and their relations with supporting details.

Dialogic Discussions
Dialogic discussion is a post-reading classroom event which allows all students to participate and give interpretations to text. Almasi (2002) stated that “discussion is defined as a dialogic classroom event in which students and teachers are cognitively, socially, and affectively engaged in collaboratively constructing meaning or considering alternate interpretations of texts to arrive at new understandings” (Cited in Almasi and Garas-York, 2009, p. 471). This means that students may shape or reshape their interpretations of texts.

Decoding words is not sufficient for comprehending texts (making sense of it). Many other factors should be gathered to achieve comprehension involving, besides recognition of vocabulary, grammar, and the remaining ones, using a number of strategies together.