reading comprehension

Comprehension can be taught directly, with lots of discussion. Talk about the inferences you make every day - work on making intelligent ones and revising them when you get new information. For reading, this is the profile of kids who really benefit from programs like Lindamood-Bell’s _Verbalizing and Visualizing_ beause so many of them need to learn to slow down and get meaning from what they’re reading. There are also some comprehension activity ideas on my site at www.resourceroom.net

The book Strategies That work has explicit lessons for teaching comprehension strategies. One of the best things to do is have them stop at the end of each page or paragraph and tell what they read. Maybe photocopy a page and have them read it and then go back and find and highlight important information. Then retell the page and finally write a short sentence or tow that states the main idea of that page. Lots of practice retelling stories is a good way to improve comprehension. Have them read some very descriptive poetry or you read it aloud while they have their eyes closed. Then draw the images they see in their mind. Teaching comprehension is strategies is one aspect of reading that is usually missing. It can be taught and this book will show you how to teach it.
Nan

I use the Lindamood Bell V& V program that Sue mentioned. But I also ask parents and teachers to constantly ask the child questions about passages they’ve read, along the lines of what Nan describes. Many kids read words without actually concentrating on the meaning behind the words. By stopping the child after every paragraph or 1/2 page and asking her/him to tell you what they’re picturing, you’ll keep them engaged in the content.

Eventually you’ll find that it becomes habit even with daily life activities to say to your child, “How do you see that?” or “What are you imagining for that?” This needs to be done constantly with kids who aren’t comprehending. The important part is to keep asking the child questions rather than telling the child something. The best way to trigger thought processes is to ask questions. Often what happens with people who are rote readers is that others start doing the talking and explaining for/to them. This gives that individual even less of a chance to practice a skill s/he sorely needs.

Hi Sally,

You’re getting good advice on comprehension from the others, but I just want to make sure that you don’t overlook some more basic potential causes to a comprehension problem.

Three problem areas come to mind, even for a child who is decoding at a decent level.

First, be sure the child can segment accurately. I have had good decoders who were miserable segmenters, and as a result had not developed good sound-to-symbol knowledge. These kids may be able to decode, but they more than likely are using comprehension-consuming “tricks” to help them do so, including a lot of part-word decoding. While such kids can often decode quite complex words, they do a lot of re-reading due to the effort that they are required to put into the original decoding of a passage.

Second, check code knowledge, especially the short vowel sounds and the sounds of the vowel digraphs. A number of good decoders score relatively high on word attack because they’ve memorized a significant sight-word list with words containing vowel digraphs (break, shout, point, etc.) and because a lot of multi-syllable words are quite regular and easy to sound out, but they still struggle when faced with multi-syllable words containing vowel digraphs (container, threatened, causation, etc.) Again, the effort they put into decoding these words causes them to have to re-read a lot of passages.

Finally, some kids are great guessers with a tremedous sight word vocabulary. While they should do poorly on a word attack test, it may not be administered because it appears there’s no reading problem present. However, such kids, I feel, have a huge “bag of tricks” up their sleeves which they use to figure out a lot of the words in their reading vocabulary, using past associations, traumatic moments in reading aloud, mnemonic assists, etc., to “read” a passage. All of this effort steals from passage comprehension, and these kids also have to re-read much of what they read if they are to make sense of it.

If a child comprehends a passage when it is read to him, but not when he reads it to himself, it is much more likely to be due to a decoding problem with an underlying cause such as one of the above, than it is to be a comprehension problem per se, in my opinion.

In addition, there is the possibility of a vision problem, but that’s another issue.

Hope this is of some help….Rod

His competency in oral language of the same concepts. How are his logic and reasoning skills? His test taking strategies? My hunch is they are poor because he has speech and language issues.. He sounds like a kid who has broken the code but he is having difficulty with oral and written language comprehension. What happens sometimes with these kids is that they have competency in simple grammatical structure but when posed with complex language structure they start to miscue when reading trying to make the complex sentences into simple sentences that they can understand. They lose the whole gestalt of what they have been reading because they have misread and do not understand complex sentence structure. So you have to teach him by starting with simple sentence structure and then ways to expand and change the meaning in both oral and written language..

I would back way up and start with the styles of genre that he is having problems with. You will more than likely find that certain words are throwing him, for example…words like therefore, inspite of, including, in addition, and so on..And other words that are not in his vocabulary. Certain descriptive words in social studies and science are very difficult for kids to master. You may want to go into roots of some of the words, as well as teaching him grammar and syntax. Talk to the SLP for more ideas or you can type in on a search engine like Google for speech and language therapy ideas for grammar, syntax and reading comprehension and you will find lots of ideas.

Other things that haven’t been discussed include background knowledge and vocabulary.

Sometimes all of us need to read several articles on a specific topic in order to build a basic set of knowledge about it before we can comprehend new information. Does he find it easier to comprehend text about familiar subjects? A while back I played with a computer program that was supposed to teach comprehension through answering questions over a selection of text. I found that if the subject was familiar, recall was simple but if the subject was new, recall of details was difficult. Our background knowledge creates a schema into which we can fit new information. For example, each of us has a schema about a restaurant, dependent on our knowledge of them.

Regarding vocabulary, if there are too many unfamiliar words in the text it can create a real bottleneck for the assimilation of information. As an example for yourself, try reading the instructions on a tax instruction form. You can decode all the words, you may know the meanings of most of them, but the complex way they are arranged can make the text almost incomprehensible except to those who use the language on a daily basis. In this case it may be phrase vocabulary that interferes with comprehension. In other cases, it may be the vocabulary of a particular subject. If one doesn’t understand the words *knit* and *purl*, knitting instructions would be quite incomprehensible even though a person can decode them. This carries over into school subjects as science and social studies. It’s a case of vocabulary overload.

Grace @

I second Rod, Pattim, and Grace here.

Weak decoding very very often *appears* to be a comprehension problem; Rod is right on here. Check multisyllable unfamiliar or nonsense words and look for lack of fluency in decoding. This is a vital first step.

As far as background, two recent experiences I’ve had this year:

A highly intelligent blind man, already holding an MSc in Engineering, changing careers and in his final year of law school; one professor gave off-topic readings to try to make the students aware of the people and lives behind the law cases (an excellent idea). One of these readings was a story of a woman who seemed to be totally uninteresting until after five minutes of questioning it turned out she was a survivor of the lower decks of the Titanic. The article was aimed originally at medical students and was at a grad-school reading level. My blind friend certainly had the intelligence and background to deal with the ideas. But a couple of the complex-complex sentences totally defeated him; he simply could not get meaning out of them. I realized that he gets most of his information orally, usually from a computer voice program. He can read Braille but with the advent of computers, few Braille books are being produced. So he simply doesn’t get the high-level language input that most people of his abilities do, and the computer reading programs do not allow the going back over sentences that most of us use in deciphering complex-complex sentences.

A little girl in Grade 3 of a French Immersion program. Most immersion programs do work very well and most kids do get a lot out of them. But this child and her friend who was in the same class have had a couple of poor teachers who have taken far too much for granted. In Grade 1 there was too much adoption of whole-language type strategies and their basic reading was very weak and their writing a lost cause. In Grade 2 the teacher assumed too much; assumed they knew phonics (and most kids in French are taught phonetically, so that would be normal, but …) and much worse, assumed they knew French and did not work on vocabulary development and understanding structures. I’ve worked on their phonics and the one girl has really caught on; and then unfortunately the teacher this year has encouraged speed and racing to finish the most pages. Unfortunately the kid’s comprehension remains at Grade 1 so she is racing through books without a clue as to what is in them. Last week we ran into a page with a fifteen-word sentence and causative action— perfectly reasonable in Grade 3: “He cruelly forced the children to do spelling and grammar exercises and dictations over and over.” — and the child simply had no clue *who* had to do the spelling exercises, which kind of ruined the meaning and humour of the story.

My point here is that these two patterns of incomprehension are the same even though one is primary school and one is grad school — a person who meets an unfamiliar structural pattern as they move up to higher-level reading without adequate background and preparation. And the cure is going to require slower reading, not faster, at least for a while.