A Challenge and a strategy

My challenge is increasing the reading comprehension of a secondary English language learners. One strategy I used intensively is to teach them how to scan the text as part of 'Dive into the text' or 'Talk to the Text'. In scanning, they look at the title of text, sub-titles, pictures, graphs etc and generally words that might be important to the text. With that comprehensible knowledge, they predict what the text might be about and connect that to their prior knowledge. This already begins to give them a degree of comprehending the text before they begin their first reading of the text.