So much of what we call reading comprehension failure is basically disguised vocabulary failure. Struggling kids don't need to be taught to "find the main idea", they need to be taught more words. And explicitly. Reading Marzano's book on vocab and I'm fascinated by this table. Look at the jump from grade 2 to 3!! There is a vocabulary avalanche in grades 3-5. The jump from 782 terms to 2,398 is just massive. Again, when students encounter so many new academic terms in grades 3-5 and struggle to "make inferences" or "identify main ideas", the problem is not “comprehension strategies”, it’s not understanding enough words! And there is an argument to say that what we think of as ‘higher-order’ subjects are really just high-density subject vocabulary subjects, even Economics, Sciences, Advanced Math terminology etc Again "critical thinking skills" don't help you if you don't understand what you're reading.

Absolutely. Make it systematic in each subject. If always embedded in rich, well-written texts, introduced with shedloads of oral work, and then revisited by being carefully positioned in subsequent texts – weeks, units & years later, their vocab size grows like wildfire.