Critical Differences Between Reading Skills and Strategies: What You Need to Know

What is a reading comprehension strategy and how is it different from a reading skill? These two terms: reading comprehension skills and reading comprehension strategies are often confused. However, both terms are important in the development of reading abilities. Keep reading to learn the critical differences between them to improve student learning.

As you might expect, these two terms can intermix and won’t necessarily always be distinct. A skill can morph into a strategy…so what’s the difference?

Definitions & Examples

Characteristics of Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Purposeful
• Conscious usage
• When you face a problem in comprehension, you would use a strategy to solve the problem

Examples of Reading Comprehension Strategies

• Metacognition (self-monitor)
• Reread
• Sound out an unknown word
• Ask someone about unknown words
• Look up words or unknown background information

Characteristics of Reading Comprehension Skills

• Automatic
• Subconscious usage
• Doesn’t require a lot of mental resources
• We just do it!

Examples of Reading Comprehension Skills

• Phonics
• Phonemic awareness
• Decoding- you can read fluently and have internalized the necessary skills without having to think much

Strategies Can Become Skills!

So, strategies are deliberate and are the product of metacognitive self-monitoring. They’re not automatic and they are used to solve problems. Skills, on the other hand, are practiced and subconscious abilities that we have seamlessly become fluent with. How does a strategy then become a skill?

Consider the example of sounding out unknown words. As children and emerging readers, we struggle to sound out words, may skip words we don’t know, and sounding out is not automatic. As adults, however, we will probably notice an unknown word, quickly and effortlessly sound it out, possibly make sense of it, and move on. This is something that has likely become a skill that was once a strategy.

Build Up Skills AND Strategies

Both skills and strategies are important, especially for middle and high school students. It’s important for teachers to foster fluency and ease with reading skills as well as instruction and modeling in reading comprehension strategies. So, foster student practice with reading skills when they struggle to decode or they have stilted fluency. Also, teach students to reread, ask questions, clarify information, and how to sound out words. They need tools and they need to be taught to be active readers.

What does it mean to be an active reader? Well, passive readers will likely ignore comprehension difficulties, skip important words, and assume they simply cannot understand the text. Active readers will use both their skills and strategies and work through confusion to understand a given text.

Check out our YouTube video for more info on reading comprehension strategies versus skills.

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