Teachers can help students develop abilities to enable them to read subject-oriented materials with better understanding. The purpose is not to conduct a lesson in reading comprehension, but to establish purposes for reading, develop word competency, search for surface and deeper meanings, and evaluate information and ideas gained through reading. Teachers can promote purposeful reading by providing suitable motives which students can discuss and weigh. Problem solving can eliminate teacher inspired purposes. The ability to grasp context clues and morphemic clues and to distinguish between literal and figurative meanings, and the study of multiple word meanings and the dictionary can help build better vocabulary skills. The ability to see relationships among ideas, to understand paragraph and other organizational patterns, and to discover meanings and relationships by analyzing sentence patterns are important measures of comprehension the teacher can help students develop. Helping students discover inferential meanings involves thinking about other ideas the messages might convey. Finally, the student's ability to judge accuracy, distinguish between fact and opinion, recognize qualification, and perceive persuasion can be accomplished by studying information obtained from several sources. (HS)