Strategies to increase comprehension

This is sort of a large question, and could be answered by writing a whole textbook.

Most of us here are very big on word attack skills. I personally use a series of traditional but well-designed workbooks, Check and Double Check Phonics, by Scholar’s Choice, available online and inexpensive. Many other people here swear by Reading Reflex, available for under $20 from Amazon.com. Others have had great success with Orton-Gillingham, the “grandfather” of LD multisensory phonics-based programs; teacher’s manual and workbooks available online from eps, which you can connect to through the International Dyslexia Association online or by phone. For older students, many recommend the Wilson program, also available online. And there are others as well.

For research backing up these approaches, go to the LD In Depth part of this website and read especially the NIH/NICHD report, as well as any of the other articles.

As far as comprehension, there are again whole programs and there are many threads on this board discussing it; use the search option at the top of the board and you will find a lot.
Many of us here have found that poor comprehension very very often comes from poor fundamental reading skills, and that once the word attack is automatic and easy, there is time and energy left over to work on comprehension, so many of us start with the foundations first.

If you have any more specific questions, please feel free to ask.

before jumping into comprehension, i would recommend that you first find out which strategies this child is weak in, just doing general comprehension may be a waste of tiime and not really address this child’s weaknesses,

i recommend the book, Teaching Reading in the Content Areas by Vacca and Vacca,

there you will find descriptions of the strategies and how to teach them,

debbie

I have a boy that interestingly enough, I am tutoring this summer as well as having him on my caseload. He is just being identified as LD this summer for mathematics. He really has a decoding problem but the results of the tests, as they are being analysed don’t state this. This is due, again to whole language. This is something that we have to be on the look for as both parents and special educators. Many of the educational evaluators are looking at test scores as comprehension issues but don’t corrolate this with decoding skills deficiencies. They say that the student doesn’t use context cues or know enough sight words. We all know that this statement is straight from whole language dogma and isn’t true. You will have to teach decoding skills first and see if the child has a comprehension problem. In my experience, children who have good auditory memory, when able to decode, will also have good written comprehension. I recommend that you use PG or Reading Reflex first and if you feel that it doesn’t meet the child’s needs, try something else. If you want help, email me directly.

As Shay said, often the primary “comprehension” problem *is* word attack. If it is, focus the time & energy there. You can’t apply the best comprehension strategies if you are applying them to the wrong words, and decoding is generaly far more efficient at figuring out the right words quickly than conscioulsy applied “context strategies.”

Is this book different from Content Area Reading: Literacy & Learning Across the Curriculum?

Carol

Assuming that decoding and fluency (reading rate and accuracy) are acceptable (which they most often are not), many students need help comprehending what they read.

As Victoria stated, this is a multi-test-book question, but here are a few comprehension skills needed for good comprehension

1. Visualization—Being able to make movies in ones head of what one reads.
2. Vocabulary—The greatest downfall to comprehension. Even if one can pronounce the work, one doesn’t know what it means.
3. Grammar/Syntax—ability to comprehend language as the writer has used it. I put getting used to reading long sentences in this category.
4. Drawing Conclusions-Critical Thinking generally.

To give you strategies and tips for all of these would fill volumes. But, to a parent who is trying to figure out the root of their child’s reading problem, these categories may help them distinguish between a decoding problem and a true comprehension problem.