Have you ever been reading a book and found yourself reading the same sentence five times? Are you struggling to understand the part of the book and you have exams in the next week? Worried about how you'll perform on exam day? Don't worry because you're not alone. A lot of people struggle with their reading comprehension skills.

Reading comprehension is understanding the text and not just reading it. When I was learning English, I made a lot of mistakes in understanding the text. That's normal for newbies. Comprehension is a skill and even native English speakers lack that skill.

If you're able to summarize the text correctly after reading it, then you have some great comprehension skills. However, if the opposite is usually true, then you don't have good comprehension skills and need to work on it. In this article, we'll discuss a few tips to improve your reading comprehension skills.

1 - Spend 20 minutes daily on reading books:

You may be reading books already, but they might be related to your exam subjects. You need to know that there is a difference between reading in preparation for exams and reading to improve comprehension skills. When you start reading with the vision of getting prepared for the exams, your mind is focused on other things, which may not let you focus on comprehension.

Since having other things distracting you can slow down your reading comprehension growth, it is important to spend twenty minutes a day with an open mind trying to understand the meaning of the text. Comprehension skills will help you a lot in your future studies. If you're like me and English isn't your first language, it's great to have books in both English and your native language. It will be very helpful for you because you'll be able to compare your comprehension of the English text to the other book.

2 - Improve your fluency

Some people read books in a word-to-word style and stop often before completing a full sentence. Stopping can be good only when you are hunting for meanings of the word, but if you want to understand the text, then you'll have to read the entire sentence with fluency.

Fluency is how quickly and smoothly you read the sentence. It doesn't make sense to stop between "I am" and "your teacher" and that usually leads to wrong conclusions. You need to read smoothly within your head and keep the rhythm and connect the words with each other.

In order to improve your fluency, try reading a sentence without stopping, and see if you know what it was trying to say. After you try that, you can break it down word-by-word to help you learn what each word means. Before long, you should find yourself being able to read and comprehend more full sentences than before.

3 - Read again and ask questions

Nothing is stopping you from reading a line again for better comprehension. In fact, if you need to work on your comprehension, it is recommended to read again to make sure that you've drawn the correct conclusions. While you read, it's good to ask questions like "Why did he do that?"

Asking questions to yourself is helpful in keeping the focus on the text since you'll try to find the answers to your questions. In order to test your comprehension skills, read the text once and write conclusions on the paper, then read again and compare your conclusions with the text.

Comprehension is very important. If you lack this comprehension skill and just trying to memorize the text cursorily, it won't benefit you in the future. Therefore, work on these skills and you'll thank yourself later.