If you are interested in improving your reading comprehension. It is easier than you think. Just apply some of the following tips and techniques, and your assimilation will improve in no time.

Tips to improve your reading comprehension.

1. Most importantly: READ.
   Yes, like this, in capital letters. To be able to improve your reading comprehension, the first thing you must do is create the habit of reading. This will help you a lot to improve different aspects of reading. As you read, you will learn to analyze the context, the message of what you read and you will also improve your vocabulary a lot, among other things. For this, you can start with simple novels on topics that you like and gradually increase the level of difficulty of these.
2. Don't be in a hurry.
   Have you heard that rush is not good? Well, in reading it is like that. A good reader knows how to adapt the reading speed to the difficulty of the text. Sometimes you will find simpler texts in which to advance more quickly, and other times, in which the text presents greater difficulty, you will have to slow down the reading rate to identify the message of the text and understand it perfectly.
3. Constantly analyze the text you read.
   From this moment the questions will be your best friends when it comes to reading. Constantly asking yourself what, how, when, why, etc. From the answers, you can continue with more complex questions. This step is essential to be able to identify and understand any type of text.
4. Look up the meaning of words that you don't understand.
   Make the dictionary your best friend. If you don't understand a word, stop what you are doing and look for its meaning. Read the definition carefully until you know what it means and what role it plays in what you are reading. Believe it or not, a single word can drastically change the meaning of the entire text.

Techniques to improve the understanding of what you read.

You can also use different techniques to improve your reading comprehension. We have made a selection of some of them for you to implement in your study and make it easier for you to understand the content of what you read.

1. Technique 1: The journalist.
   It consists of reading a text asking yourself the typical questions that a journalist would ask: what? as? When ?, etc. When you formulate them, you must fill in a table with three columns: one for what happens in the text (what), another for who carries it out (who?) And another for the circumstances in which it happens (When? How? Why?) In the end, the information will be structured by segments that, when joined, will give complete meaning to the text.
2. Technique 2: Concept maps.
   This is undoubtedly a great technique to dissect the text, complete definitions, and understand the role that each concept plays within it. In this technique, it is also very easy to get an idea of ​​how the different parts of the main text are interrelated. 
3. Technique 3: Headline paragraphs.
   This technique is based on finding and identifying the main idea of ​​each paragraph to help us better understand the text as a whole. In this way, with a simple glance, we will put ourselves in a situation of what happens in the text and what are the main concepts of this.
4. Technique 4: The underline.
   This is probably one of the most used techniques to understand and synthesize a text. It consists of highlighting the main concepts of the text, both definitions, and dates or relevant data. 

Exercises and activities to improve reading comprehension

In addition to everything we have discussed in the previous sections, you can also work on and improve your reading comprehension by performing various exercises and activities. Here are some that we think will be useful to you to practice until you manage to develop and improve your understanding of the texts.

1. Exercise 1: Questions and answers.
   Select a text or a fragment of one. It does not matter much if it is more or less relevant because what we will do is carry out a series of questions about it to write the answers and practice the journalist's technique.
2. Exercise 2: Synthesize the text.
   In this exercise, you will have to make a summary of a text after reading it, but using your own words at all times for it.
3. Exercise 3: Map your understanding.
   To do this, you must detect the main ideas of the text and order them later inboxes. From these, you must complete the information related to the action using arrows without looking at the text.

In addition to all this, there are many more activities that you can do to improve your reading comprehension. You can work on some of them with your own resources: leave gaps in your summaries to fill them in, but fragments of sentences out of order to order them later, compare several texts on the same topic to draw conclusions, etc.

And one more thing you can do, you can set a time to complete your per day reading task, which means you have to complete your target to read a fixed number of paragraphs. You can use this - howmanydaysbetween.com date calculator to plan your weeks and dates. 

There are also exercises on the internet that you can download to practice a little every day and improve your linguistic competence: Test of linguistic competencies, synonyms, and antonyms, inclusion and involvement ... These types of exercises will greatly enrich your level of vocabulary and are very enjoyable.

As you can see, reading comprehension is a determining factor when it comes to understanding a text correctly and in-depth and, consequently, learning.

Follow these tips, read a little every day and make the dictionary your ally. It may cost you a bit at first, but you will see how with perseverance and determination, in less time than you imagine you will have acquired good reading comprehension.