Describing a lesson explicitly to students is an important part of pre-teaching. Preparing students for the planned activities can increase their comfort level and willingness to participate. In this video, adult education instructor Kay Combs outlines a reading comprehension lesson and introduces some of the tools they will use, including summarizing.

Summarizing a text leads to better comprehension. Combs asks her class to answer who, what, when, where, and why questions about the text in order to summarize it. They write down who the narrative is about, what happens, where it happens, etc. As they read, they actively search for the answers to those questions. Once they are able to summarize by identifying those elements of the text, they have a better understanding of what they have read.

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