Why reading comprehension matters and how to teach it effectively

16.10.2025

7 minutes

Reading
Methodology

Reading comprehension is one of the most important language skills for any learner. While reading might not be every student’s favorite activity, it remains crucial.

There are numerous benefits to reading and completing comprehension tasks:

It enhances spelling. Unlike listening, reading exposes students to the written word on a phonemic level.
It broadens students' understanding of how language works by providing contextualized vocabulary and collocations.
Reading introduces learners to grammar, functional language, and discourse structures in authentic use.

However, reading alone isn’t enough. Teachers must help students decode texts and assess their comprehension to ensure that the meaning is understood correctly. That’s why choosing appropriate, level-tailored activities is essential.

Before assigning reading tasks, consider:

How will this task help my learners?
Which skills and subskills are we focusing on?
How can it be challenging yet motivating?

This post explores practical, classroom-tested activities for different CEFR levels, along with key theory and examples.

What’s reading comprehension in EFL?

Reading comprehension is the ability to read a text, process it, and understand its meaning. It involves two core skills: decoding (recognizing written symbols) and language comprehension (understanding meaning).

According to Jeremy Harmer, learners activate the following when reading:

Decoding: Recognizing words and sounds.
Vocabulary & Grammar: Understanding structures and meanings.
Inference & Prediction: Reading between the lines and anticipating content.
Schema Activation: Using prior knowledge and experience to make sense of the text.

These components develop over time and present challenges at different stages:

A1–A2: Limited vocabulary slows understanding; decoding is still developing.
B1–B2: Students may struggle with inference and recognizing text cohesion.
C1+: Learners may find tone, nuance, and implicit meaning difficult.

In this part, I should have written about some approaches and the basics of reading comprehension. But this article is not theoretical.

If you need to refresh or learn about it, you should consider viewing and taking the course on reading at the Grade University platform. Created by professionals for teachers who want to become more skilled and equipped.

A1-A2 level activities

As I mentioned before, A-level students are only at the very beginning of their learning path. The tasks provided to them should be:

Concise
Easy to read
Follow the order of the text
Supported with visual aids or other help

So, here are a bunch of tasks that are student-approved and which they truly enjoyed completing.

Picture-based comprehension

Type of tasks: lead-in and reading for gist

Procedure: Activate schemata and warm your students up with a lead-in activity first.

1. Show your students photos or pictures related to the text. Ask your students to say what they can see in the pictures.

2. Then show them a short part of the text or the headline. Ask them about how the pictures and this information are related. While your students are sharing their ideas, you should elicit and write down their ideas.

3. After that, give your students a text to read. When they finish, ask them to (you can do what suits the best to your text best):

The matching picture
By the odd picture
Put the pictures in the correct order

Note that the images should be as close to the text content as possible, so you don’t confuse your students.

I often use pictures for reading to encourage my students and support them, especially when I can anticipate their struggles with reading.

Here are some modifications for more detailed reading that my students enjoyed and found interesting and motivating:

1. Pictures as the answer options. Instead of classical multiple-choice questions, use a more visual version. However, it can take some time for preparation.

2. Picture matching. If the reading piece contains some names and specific information, you can put the names and this information in pictures so students can match. It’s a great activity to do in pairs.

3. Read the text and find the mistake in the illustration. It’s a fun and creative task that focuses on details. Students must read the text thoroughly to find where the picture is inaccurate. I suggest using 2 or 3 pictures, which can be given to different students. Firstly, they discuss it separately, and then as a next step, they share their findings with other students.

Depending on the text and your students’ preferences (if any), you can use comic-style images (like anime or similar), emojis, icons, or digital paintings. There is so much to explore!

Find someone who….(jigsaw reading task variation)

This task will be a great opportunity for all students to participate in a classroom discussion and peer teaching. This task is an adapted and adjusted version of a popular speaking activity.

1. Present the list of statements with the header “FIND SOMEONE WHO…?” Elicit that students are going to look for information related to these statements in the texts.

2. Before that, they should do some reading and match statements with the texts they will get. You can break the bigger text into smaller parts. If the group is large, you can assign the matching activity to a group to complete together.

3. After that, students will need to find the rest of the information that is missing in their parts of the texts. They’ll need to ask the new partners the questions about the information they don’t have and answer the questions as well. The objective is to complete the whole list of statements given.

4. After they are finished, provide them with feedback and ask students to provide more information.

These tasks can be adapted to things, places, and any kind of information you need your students to comprehend.

But I must admit that it’s a little bit time-consuming, but you’ll get to cooperate with our students with each other and not load them with lots of information at once.