Definition for reading comprehension
Comprehension | Reading Rockets
Comprehension is the understanding and interpretation of what is read. To be able to accurately understand written material, children need to be able to (1) decode what they read; (2) make connections between what they read and what they already know; and (3) think deeply about what they have read.
One big part of comprehension is having a sufficient vocabulary, or knowing the meanings of enough words. Readers who have strong comprehension are able to draw conclusions about what they read – what is important, what is a fact, what caused an event to happen, which characters are funny. Thus comprehension involves combining reading with thinking and reasoning.
Target the Problem: Comprehension
What the problem looks like
A kid's perspective: What this feels like to me
Children will usually express their frustration and difficulties in a general way, with statements like "I hate reading!" or "This is stupid!". But if they could, this is how kids might describe how comprehension difficulties in particular affect their reading:
- It takes me so long to read something. It's hard to follow along with everything going on.
- I didn't really get what that book was about.
- Why did that character do that? I just don't get it!
- I'm not sure what the most important parts of the book were.
- I couldn't really create an image in my head of what was going on.
A parent's perspective: What I see at home
Here are some clues for parents that a child may have problems with comprehension:
- She's not able to summarize a passage or a book.
- He might be able to tell you what happened in a story, but can't explain why events went the way they did.
- She can't explain what a character's thoughts or feelings might have been.
- He doesn't link events in a book to similar events from another book or from real life.
A teacher's perspective: What I see in the classroom
Here are some clues for teachers that a student may have problems with comprehension:
- He seems to focus on the "wrong" aspect of a passage; for example, he concentrates so much on the details that the main idea is lost.
- She can tell the outcome of a story, but cannot explain why things turned out that way.
- He does not go behind what is presented in a book to think about what might happen next or why characters took the action they did.
- She brings up irrelevant information when trying to relate a passage to something in her own life.
- He seems to have a weak vocabulary.
- She cannot tell the clear, logical sequence of events in a story.
- He does not pick out the key facts from informational text.
- He cannot give you a "picture" of what's going on in a written passage; for example, what the characters look like or details of where the story takes place.
How to help
With the help of parents and teachers, kids can learn strategies to cope with comprehension problems that affect his or her reading. Below are some tips and specific things to do.
What kids can do to help themselves
- Use outlines, maps, and notes when you read.
- Make flash cards of key terms you might want to remember.
- Read stories or passages in short sections and make sure you know what happened before you continue reading.
- Ask yourself, "Does this make sense?" If it doesn't, reread the part that didn't make sense.
- Read with a buddy. Stop every page or so and take turns summarizing what you've read.
- Ask a parent or teacher to preview a book with you before you read it on your own.
- As you read, try to form mental pictures or images that match the story.
What parents can do to help at home
- Hold a conversation and discuss what your child has read. Ask your child probing questions about the book and connect the events to his or her own life. For example, say "I wonder why that girl did that?" or "How do you think he felt? Why?" and "So, what lesson can we learn here?".
- Help your child make connections between what he or she reads and similar experiences he has felt, saw in a movie, or read in another book.
- Help your child monitor his or her understanding. Teach her to continually ask herself whether she understands what she's reading.
- Help your child go back to the text to support his or her answers.
- Discuss the meanings of unknown words, both those he reads and those he hears.
- Read material in short sections, making sure your child understands each step of the way.
- Discuss what your child has learned from reading informational text such as a science or social studies book.
What teachers can do to help at school
- As students read, ask them open-ended questions such as "Why did things happen that way?" or "What is the author trying to do here?" and "Why is this somewhat confusing?".
- Teach students the structure of different types of reading material. For instance, narrative texts usually have a problem, a highpoint of action, and a resolution to the problem. Informational texts may describe, compare and contrast, or present a sequence of events.
- Discuss the meaning of words as you go through the text. Target a few words for deeper teaching, really probing what those words mean and how they can be used.
- Teach note-taking skills and summarizing strategies.
- Use graphic organizers that help students break information down and keep tack of what they read.
- Encourage students to use and revisit targeted vocabulary words.
- Teach students to monitor their own understanding. Show them how, for example, to ask themselves "What's unclear here?" or "What information am I missing?" and "What else should the author be telling me?".
- Teach children how to make predictions and how to summarize.
More information
Find out more about comprehension issues with these resources from Reading Rockets, The Access Center, and LD OnLine:
Other recommended links:
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What is Reading Comprehension?
Apple banana blue walk tree happy sing.
Surely you were able to read each of the words in that sentence and understand what they meant independently. An apple is a fruit that is usually round and red, green or yellow. A banana is another fruit that is yellow. Blue is a color…and so on and so forth. However, when you look at the sentence as a whole, does it make sense? Probably not. This nonsense sentence demonstrates the difference between being able to read words and comprehend text. As practiced readers we may take this distinction for granted since the acts of reading and comprehension occur almost simultaneously for us. For developing readers this relationship is not as apparent, but is essential for them to become strong, capable readers.
What exactly IS reading comprehension?
Simply put, reading comprehension is the act of understanding what you are reading. While the definition can be simply stated the act is not simple to teach, learn or practice. Reading comprehension is an intentional, active, interactive process that occurs before, during and after a person reads a particular piece of writing.
Reading comprehension is one of the pillars of the act of reading. When a person reads a text he engages in a complex array of cognitive processes. He is simultaneously using his awareness and understanding of phonemes (individual sound “pieces” in language), phonics (connection between letters and sounds and the relationship between sounds, letters and words) and ability to comprehend or construct meaning from the text. This last component of the act of reading is reading comprehension. It cannot occur independent of the other two elements of the process. At the same time, it is the most difficult and most important of the three.
There are two elements that make up the process of reading comprehension: vocabulary knowledge and text comprehension. In order to understand a text the reader must be able to comprehend the vocabulary used in the piece of writing. If the individual words don’t make the sense then the overall story will not either.
Children can draw on their prior knowledge of vocabulary, but they also need to continually be taught new words. The best vocabulary instruction occurs at the point of need. Parents and teachers should pre-teach new words that a child will encounter in a text or aid her in understanding unfamiliar words as she comes upon them in the writing. In addition to being able to understand each distinct word in a text, the child also has to be able to put them together to develop an overall conception of what it is trying to say. This is text comprehension. Text comprehension is much more complex and varied that vocabulary knowledge. Readers use many different text comprehension strategies to develop reading comprehension. These include monitoring for understanding, answering and generating questions, summarizing and being aware of and using a text’s structure to aid comprehension.
How does reading comprehension develop?
As you can see, reading comprehension is incredibly complex and multifaceted.
Because of this, readers do not develop the ability to comprehend texts quickly, easily or independently. Reading comprehension strategies must be taught over an extended period of time by parents and teachers who have knowledge and experience using them. It might seem that once a child learns to read in the elementary grades he is able to tackle any future text that comes his way. This is not true. Reading comprehension strategies must be refined, practiced and reinforced continually throughout life. Even in the middle grades and high school, parents and teachers need to continue to help their children develop reading comprehension strategies. As their reading materials become more diverse and challenging, children need to learn new tools for comprehending these texts. Content area materials such as textbooks and newspaper, magazine and journal articles pose different reading comprehension challenges for young people and thus require different comprehension strategies. The development of reading comprehension is a lifelong process that changes based on the depth and breadth of texts the person is reading.
Why is reading comprehension so important?
Without comprehension, reading is nothing more than tracking symbols on a page with your eyes and sounding them out. Imagine being handed a story written in Egyptian hieroglyphics with no understanding of their meaning. You may appreciate the words aesthetically and even be able to draw some small bits of meaning from the page, but you are not truly reading the story. The words on the page have no meaning. They are simply symbols. People read for many reasons but understanding is always a part of their purpose. Reading comprehension is important because without it reading doesn’t provide the reader with any information.
Beyond this, reading comprehension is essential to life. Much has been written about the importance of functional literacy. In order to survive and thrive in today’s world individuals must be able to comprehend basic texts such as bills, housing agreements (leases, purchase contracts), directions on packaging and transportation documents (bus and train schedules, maps, travel directions).
Reading comprehension is a critical component of functional literacy. Think of the potentially dire effects of not being able to comprehend dosage directions on a bottle of medicine or warnings on a container of dangerous chemicals. With the ability to comprehend what they read, people are able not only to live safely and productively, but also to continue to develop socially, emotionally and intellectually
What does it mean to understand what you read?
Hello dear readers!
In the first article after the New Year, I will touch on the topic Reading comprehension. I think many will be interested.
The French scientist Descartes said: " Define a term and you will get rid of many misunderstandings ".
We will also give a definition of the term Understanding .
Understanding — psychological state, correct perception or interpretation of an event, phenomenon, fact, accepted in a certain circle.
( Wikipedia )
Understanding is the ability to comprehend the meaning and significance of something.
Understanding is directed not at the text itself, but at its meaning, its ideas. The text is only an intermediary between the author and the reader. This is a character set.
The author puts meaning in the process of creating a text. The reader reproduces this meaning in the process of reading and puts this meaning into new texts generated by this meaning.
How to check the perception of the idea contained in the text ?
Reproduce this idea in a newly created text, for example, paraphrase. This will demonstrate some level of understanding.
There are seven levels of understanding.
First level of comprehension:
Comprehension consists in the ability to repeat the read text, mentally, to make sure that the text is understood.
Second level of comprehension:
Example - training text and retelling requirement.
The criterion of understanding is the ability to isolate the semantic structure and convey it in retelling. Answer the questions. But at the same time, the answers to control questions are the meaning revealed by the teacher and the student's verification. Those. someone has already identified the meaning (the teacher) and the student only needs to confirm.
A qualified reader formulates questions himself and this is part of the generated new texts.
Third level of comprehension :
Highlighting key points or summarizing the facts found in the text.
The first, second and third levels of understanding are based on a formally defined text structure and contain its description.
They call it — Instructive pragmatics . For texts that describe previously known facts of reality and do not imply the emergence of new meanings that are different from those laid down in the text.
Texts with instructive pragmatics carry information about unambiguously interpreted data or are clear instructions.
An example of such a text is a description of how to find an acquaintance’s apartment, a typical summary of data, an order, a ritual formula, etc.
The fourth level of understanding creative re-creation of meaning.
The task of understanding makes one turn to one's own creative ability, to imagination and fantasy.
This usually refers to literary texts, the understanding of which is not only the identification of the structure.
Fifth level of understanding :
Refers to texts that have a large number of commentary texts about the correct disclosure of the meaning laid down by the author.
This level includes, in addition to studying the basic text, also studying commentary texts and choosing an acceptable interpretation.
The sixth level of understanding :
Applicable to the highest examples of literary texts. When the comments are fundamentally different.
For example: how to understand the fight against windmills in Cervantes' novel Don Quixote - as madness or a manifestation of knightly prowess.
Only the presence of additional comments creates understanding, expanding one's own boundaries of world perception. Otherwise, you can get stuck in one understanding, limited by your own picture of the world.
The seventh level of understanding :
When all generated texts do not provide adequate understanding. Understanding lies in Comprehension. An example is the Gospel.
Creative pragmatics - this situation requires the reader's creative abilities to be connected.
To understand the meaning, it is required not so much to comprehend and reproduce the meaning of what was read, but to create a new text that would testify to the emergence of understanding.
The original text gives rise to new texts, new interpretations. The more new meanings are born, the more significant the work.
*****
It will be interesting to do a little research together with you, dear readers.
Let's read one work of art and try to express the meaning laid down by the author.
Briefly, as understood. I think there will be many interpretations.
I propose as such a small work - the story A.P. Chekhov "Ionych" .
Finding a story is easy on the Internet. It will take a little time to read.
I look forward to your interpretations and new meanings seen in the story. Write in the comments.
6 Key Skills for Reading Comprehension
For some people, reading is like a walk in the park on a warm summer day, an enjoyable activity that is easy to master. In fact, reading is a complex process that involves many different skills. Together, these skills lead to the ultimate goal of learning to read: comprehensive reading comprehension.
Text comprehension can be difficult for children for many reasons, but regardless of them, knowing what underdeveloped skills this is due to, you will be able to provide your child with the best help.
Let's take a look at the six reading comprehension skills and how you can help your child develop them.
1. Decoding
Decoding is a critical step in the reading process. Children use this skill to sound out words they have heard before but not seen written. The ability to decode is the foundation of all other reading skills.
Decoding relies on one of the first language skills to develop, phonemic comprehension (this skill is part of a broader set of skills called phonological comprehension). Phonemic awareness allows children to hear and distinguish individual sounds in words (also known as phonemes). It also allows them to "play" with sounds in syllables and words.
Decoding also relies on the ability to match individual sounds and letters. For example, to read the word "sun", the child must know that the letter "s" sounds like "s". Understanding the relationship between letters and sounds is an important step towards "voicing" words.
How to help: Many children learn phonological awareness naturally by reading books, listening to songs and poems.
But for some children it is not so easy. In fact, one of the earliest signs of reading difficulty is trouble with rhyming, counting syllables, or identifying the first sound in a word.
The best way to help your child improve these skills is to guide them with precise instructions and lots of practice. Children need to be taught how to correctly identify sounds and work with them. You can also develop phonological perception by playing with words, reading poems aloud to your child, or using special computer techniques aimed at developing phonemic perception and decoding.
2. Reading fluently
To read fluently, children must recognize words immediately, including words that do not read as they are written. By developing reading fluency, the child increases not only reading speed, but also reading comprehension.
Decoding and reading each word can be a lot of work. Word recognition is the ability to recognize a word instantly just by looking at it, without having to read it out loud.
When children can read quickly and with almost no errors, they are said to be able to read "fluently".
People who can read fluently read fluently and rhythmically. They use the context to understand the meaning and change the intonation in their voice depending on what they are reading about. The ability to read fluently is critical to a good understanding of the text.
How to help: Word recognition can be a big hurdle for beginning readers. Usually a person needs to see a word from 4 to 14 times in order to learn to automatically recognize it. But, for example, children diagnosed with dyslexia may need to see the word up to 40 times.
Many children have difficulty reading fluently. To improve word recognition and other reading skills, children need help and a lot of practice. The best way to strengthen these skills is to practice reading books. It is important to choose books that are appropriate for the child's reading level.
3.
Vocabulary
To understand what you read, you need to understand at least most of the words in the text. A rich vocabulary is a key component of text comprehension. Students can learn new words during class, but they usually learn the meaning of words through everyday situations and while reading.
How to help: The more new words children learn, the more their vocabulary grows. You can help your child develop vocabulary by talking to him often about different topics, introducing him to new words and concepts. Word games and funny jokes are also fun ways for children to reinforce these skills.
Daily reading together also helps to build vocabulary. When reading aloud to your child, stop when you encounter new words and explain their meaning. But it is also important that the child reads independently. Even if there is no one to explain the meaning of a new word, the child can guess its meaning from the context, and also learn with the help of a dictionary.
Teachers can also help by choosing interesting words to study and learning them all together in class. To practice vocabulary, the teacher can engage students in dialogue during the lesson, or play word games to make learning new words fun.
4. Sentence construction and cohesion
Understanding how sentences are built can seem like a skill necessary for writing. The same can be said about the connection of ideas within and between sentences, which is called cohesion. But these skills are also important for reading comprehension.
Knowing how ideas connect at the sentence level helps children make sense of passages and entire texts. This also leads to what is called coherence, or the ability to relate ideas to other ideas in a common work.
How to help: Explain the basics of sentence construction to your child. Work with him to connect two or more thoughts, both in writing and orally.
5. Expanding horizons and reasoning
read. It is also important to teach the child to “read between the lines” and find meaning where it is not literally written.
How to help: Your child can broaden their horizons through reading, socializing, watching movies and TV shows, and exploring art. Also many things come with years of personal experience.
Open up opportunities for your child to gain new useful knowledge in different areas and discuss with him what you have learned from the experience gained, both together and separately. Help your child make connections between new and old knowledge and ask questions that require extended answers and thoughtful explanations.
You can also read these tips on how to use cartoons to help your child learn to judge for themselves.
6. Working memory and attention
These two skills are part of a group of skills also known as executive functions.
They are different, but closely related.
When children read, attention allows them to absorb information from the text. Working memory helps them retain this information and use it to make sense and gain knowledge from what they read.
The ability to control oneself while reading is also related to executive functions. The child must be able to recognize when he does not understand something, stop, go back and reread, so that there is no doubt about the understanding of what he read.
How to help: There are many ways to help your child improve working memory, and it doesn't have to look like a lesson. There are many games and daily activities that can help develop working memory in a way that your child won't even notice!
To improve your child's concentration, look for reading materials that interest and/or motivate your child. For example, some children love graphic novels. Teach your child to stop and reread the text when something is not clear to him.
And show him how you “think out loud” when you read to make sure it makes sense.
More ways to help with text comprehension
When children have difficulty learning the above skills, they may find it difficult to fully understand what they read.
Find out what might be causing your child's reading difficulties. Remember, if a child has difficulty reading, it does not mean that he is not smart. But some children need extra support to successfully develop reading skills. The sooner you contact a specialist or start applying a special corrective technique, the less stress and lag in learning and development your child will receive. Pay attention to the computer technique Fast ForWord, aimed at developing the skills of phonemic perception, decoding, memory, concentration and other executive functions.
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Decoding, reading fluency and vocabulary are key skills needed for reading comprehension.
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