Teaching Comprehension - Comprehensive Guide, F-2

About this teaching resource

Diane Snowball's Teaching Comprehension: Comprehensive Guide (F-2) is an invaluable resource designed to empower F-2 teachers in developing young students' reading comprehension from the ground up. This guide emphasises that comprehension involves more than surface-level understanding; it requires integrating background knowledge with text information to construct meaningful interpretations.

In her guide, Snowball provides a clear roadmap for distinguishing between comprehension products—like literal and inferential understandings—and comprehension processes, which include the essential cognitive strategies that teachers can teach and assess. This resource covers key factors influencing comprehension, including background knowledge, vocabulary, text complexity, and cohesive ties, enabling teachers to help students navigate meaning across sentences and diverse genres.

The guide offers early instruction techniques for listening comprehension, inference, visualisation, and questioning—essential strategies for deepening understanding. Through explicit modelling, interactive read-alouds, and guided discussions, teachers can build students' foundational comprehension skills, such as using clues to make inferences, understanding pronoun references, and integrating illustrations.

With structured teaching, ongoing assessment, and the Gradual Release of Responsibility model, Snowball's guide helps teachers create a strategic, responsive, and meaningful approach to comprehension instruction. Perfect for F-2 classrooms, it's a must-have resource for fostering independent, confident readers.