What are reading skills

6 Reading Comprehension Skills | Understood

Some people think of the act of reading as a straightforward task that’s easy to master. In reality, reading is a complex process that draws on many different skills. Together, these skills lead to the ultimate goal of reading: reading comprehension, or understanding what’s been read.

Reading comprehension can be challenging for lots of reasons. Whatever the cause, knowing the skills involved, and which ones your child struggles with, can help you get the right support.

Here are six essential skills needed for , and tips on what can help kids improve this skill.

1. Decoding

Decoding is a vital step in the reading process. Kids use this skill to sound out words they’ve heard before but haven’t seen written out. The ability to do that is the foundation for other reading skills.

Decoding relies on an early language skill called phonemic awareness. (This skill is part of an even broader skill called phonological awareness. ) Phonemic awareness lets kids hear individual sounds in words (known as phonemes). It also allows them to “play” with sounds at the word and syllable level.

Decoding also relies on connecting individual sounds to letters. For instance, to read the word sun, kids must know that the letter s makes the /s/ sound. Grasping the connection between a letter (or group of letters) and the sounds they typically make is an important step toward “sounding out” words.

What can help: Most kids pick up the broad skill of phonological awareness naturally, by being exposed to books, songs, and rhymes. But some kids don’t. In fact, one of the early signs of reading difficulties is trouble with rhyming, counting syllables, or identifying the first sound in a word.

The best way to help kids with these skills is through specific instruction and practice. Kids have to be taught how to identify and work with sounds. You can also build phonological awareness at home through activities like word games and reading to your child.

2. Fluency

To read fluently, kids need to instantly recognize words, including words they can’t sound out. Fluency speeds up the rate at which they can read and understand text. It’s also important when kids encounter irregular words, like of and the, which can’t be sounded out.

Sounding out or decoding every word can take a lot of effort. Word recognition is the ability to recognize whole words instantly by sight, without sounding them out.

When kids can read quickly and without making too many errors, they are “fluent” readers.

Fluent readers read smoothly at a good pace. They group words together to help with meaning, and they use the proper tone in their voice when reading aloud. Reading fluency is essential for good reading comprehension.

What can help: Word recognition can be a big obstacle for struggling readers. Average readers need to see a word four to 14 times before it becomes a “sight word” they automatically recognize. Kids with dyslexia, for instance, may need to see it up to 40 times.

Lots of kids struggle with reading fluency. As with other reading skills, kids need lots of specific instruction and practice to improve word recognition.

The main way to help build fluency is through practice reading books. It’s important to pick out books that are at the right level of difficulty for kids.

3. Vocabulary

To understand what you’re reading, you need to understand most of the words in the text. Having a strong vocabulary is a key component of reading comprehension. Students can learn vocabulary through instruction. But they typically learn the meaning of words through everyday experience and also by reading.

What can help: The more words kids are exposed to, the richer their vocabulary becomes. You can help build your child’s vocabulary by having frequent conversations on a variety of topics. Try to include new words and ideas. Telling jokes and playing word games is a fun way to build this skill.

Reading together every day also helps improve vocabulary. When reading aloud, stop at new words and define them. But also encourage your child to read alone. Even without hearing a definition of a new word, your child can use context to help figure it out.

Teachers can help, too. They can carefully choose interesting words to teach and then give explicit instruction (instruction that is specialized and direct). They can engage students in conversation. And they can make learning vocabulary fun by playing word games in class.

For more ideas, watch as an expert explains how to help struggling readers build their vocabulary.

4. Sentence construction and cohesion

Understanding how sentences are built might seem like a writing skill. So might connecting ideas within and between sentences, which is called cohesion. But these skills are important for reading comprehension as well.

Knowing how ideas link up at the sentence level helps kids get meaning from passages and entire texts. It also leads to something called coherence, or the ability to connect ideas to other ideas in an overall piece of writing.

What can help: Explicit instruction can teach kids the basics of sentence construction. For example, teachers can work with students on connecting two or more thoughts, through both writing and reading.

5. Reasoning and background knowledge

Most readers relate what they’ve read to what they know. So it’s important for kids to have background or prior knowledge about the world when they read. They also need to be able to “read between the lines” and pull out meaning even when it’s not literally spelled out.

Take this example: A child is reading a story about a poor family in the 1930s. Having knowledge about the Great Depression can provide insight into what’s happening in the story. The child can use that background knowledge to make inferences and draw conclusions.

What can help: Your child can build knowledge through reading, conversations, movies and TV shows, and art. Life experience and hands-on activities also build knowledge.

Expose your child to as much as possible, and talk about what you’ve learned from experiences you’ve had together and separately. Help your child make connections between new knowledge and existing knowledge. And ask open-ended questions that require thinking and explanations.

You can also read a teacher tip on using animated videos to help your child make inferences.

6. Working memory and attention

These two skills are both part of a group of abilities known as executive function. They’re different but closely related.

When kids read, attention allows them to take in information from the text. Working memory allows them to hold on to that information and use it to gain meaning and build knowledge from what they’re reading.

The ability to self-monitor while reading is also tied to that. Kids need to be able to recognize when they don’t understand something. Then they need to stop, go back, and re-read to clear up any confusion they may have.

What can help: There are many ways you can help improve your child’s working memory. Skillbuilders don’t have to feel like work, either. There are a number of games and everyday activities that can build working memory without kids even knowing it.

To help increase your child’s attention, look for reading material that’s interesting or motivating. For example, some kids may like graphic novels. Encourage your child to stop and re-read when something isn’t clear. And demonstrate how you “think aloud” when you read to make sure what you’re reading makes sense.

Key takeaways

Decoding, fluency, and vocabulary skills are key to reading comprehension.
Being able to connect ideas within and between sentences helps kids understand the whole text.
Reading aloud and talking about experiences can help kids build reading skills.

Reading Skills: What They Are, Types, Stages, How to Improve

Table of contents:

Introduction
Types of reading skills
The 4 stages of reading skills development
4 Types of reading difficulties
Developing reading skills
Key takeaways

Introduction

Reading is a fundamental but complex skill that children must acquire because they must

learn to read

read to learn

Before building a house, one needs to lay a foundation. In the same way, there are preparatory and supportive skills that children must acquire before it becomes possible for them to master the art of reading. We discuss the various types of preparatory and supportive reading skills, the four stages of reading skills development, four types of reading difficulties, and how to develop reading skills.

Types of reading skills

There are a variety of preparatory and supportive reading skills:

Decoding

To be a good reader, you have to be able to decode words. Decoding is the ability to apply your knowledge of letter-sound relationships and letter patterns and correctly pronounce written words.

To decode a word,

(1.) you need to know which sound or sounds each letter makes, like how a g sounds in game and how it sounds in gym;
(2. ) how to take apart the individual sounds in a word and blend them, e.g., with man the first sound is /m/, the next sound is /ă/, and the last sound is /n/; and
(3.) how groups of letters can work together to make a single sound, like sh in ship.

Understanding letter-sound relationships gives children the ability to recognize familiar words quickly and figure out unfamiliar words.

If attention is drained by decoding words, little or no capacity is available for the attention-demanding process of reading comprehension. Therefore, the automaticity of decoding is essential.

Although children may sometimes figure out some of the letter-sounds relationships by themselves, most children benefit from explicit instruction. Phonics is one approach to reading instruction that teaches students the principles of letter-sound relationships, how to sound out words, and exceptions to these principles.

Phonological and phonemic awareness

Decoding relies heavily on phonological awareness, which refers to an individual’s awareness of the sound structure of language. A listening skill, phonological awareness is the ability to distinguish between speech units such as rhymes, syllables in words, and individual phonemes in syllables.

Phonological awareness is often confused with phonics. The latter requires students to know and match letters or letter patterns with sounds, learn spelling rules, and use this information to decode (read) and encode (write) words. Phonological awareness relates only to speech sounds, not alphabet letters or sound-spellings.

Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness that focuses on recognizing and manipulating phonemes, the smallest sound units. Two crucial phonemic awareness skills are segmenting and blending.

Reading fluency

Sounding out or decoding every word can take a lot of effort. Fluency, defined as “speed, accuracy, and proper expression,” gained prominence when it was included as one of five essential reading skills in a national-level research synthesis on reading instruction.

To read fluently, readers need effective word recognition skills. Word recognition is the ability to recognize whole words instantly by sight without sounding them out.

Reading fluency speeds up the rate at which they can read and understand text. Reading fluency is also important when kids encounter irregular words, like one and the, which cannot be sounded out.

When kids can read smoothly, without making too many errors, they are “fluent readers.”

Reading comprehension

Reading comprehension refers to a reader’s ability to successfully interpret a text and connect the ideas in the text to their background knowledge. Since the purpose of all reading is to gather meaning from the printed page, reading comprehension is the heart and goal of reading. According to Duffy, if we do not understand the message, we are not reading.

Readers with good reading comprehension are able to draw conclusions about what they read – what is the main message, what is a fact, what caused an event to happen, and which characters are funny. Thus comprehension involves combining reading with thinking and reasoning.

Vocabulary

One big part of comprehension is vocabulary knowledge, i.e., knowing the meanings of enough words.

Being able to pronounce a word correctly does not guarantee that one understands its meaning. For example, pronouncing the word archipelago correctly will not be very helpful when reading a passage about Lofoten, an archipelago in the county of Norland, Norway; it is vital that one also understands the word’s meaning, i.e., an island group.

Decades of research have confirmed the importance of vocabulary skills in reading comprehension and students’ overall academic success.

Memory

Short-term memory is the capacity for holding, but not manipulating, a small amount of information in one’s mind in an active, readily available state for a short period. Working memory is like a temporary sticky note in the brain. It holds new information in place so the brain can manipulate it or connect it to other data or prior knowledge. It is an essential memory system and one that most of us use daily.

Sentence comprehension depends heavily upon adequate working memory. Each sentence is read, understood, associated, and integrated with the previous one, and so forth. Eventually, after reading the entire paragraph, the reader continues to the next one. By the end of the chapter, the reader needs to retain both the details and the main idea, otherwise may recall isolated facts but may not know the sequence of events nor understand the main idea.

Logical thinking

Logical thinking is the process in which one uses reasoning consistently to reach a conclusion. Problems or situations that involve logical thinking call for structure, relationships between facts, and chains of reasoning that “make sense.”

The relationship between logical thinking and reading is well established. It has been said that “there is no reading without reasoning,” and even that reading is reasoning.

This reading skill helps the child tie their background knowledge to new knowledge, make inferences, draw conclusions, and read between the lines.

Rapid naming

Rapid naming happens when you recognize something instantly and effortlessly and say what it is. It can be anything. At the most basic level it can be objects, symbols, and colors. At a higher level, this can include words and phrases.

Dyslexic readers frequently show weaknesses on tests of rapid naming ability. There is an ongoing debate about whether the underlying deficit is visual or phonological. However, the strong correlation between dyslexia and difficulties with rapid naming justifies its inclusion in our list of reading skills.

Other reading skills

In addition to phonological and phonemic awareness, rapid naming, and working memory, cognitive psychology has now linked many brain-based skills to reading deficits like dyslexia: verbal fluency; attention and executive functions; visual attention; visuospatial abilities; processing speed; short-term memory; auditory memory; visual and visual sequential memory; and visual long-term memory, especially for details.

The 4 Stages of reading skills development

Pre-alphabetic stage

Readers at the pre-alphabetic stage have no appreciation of the alphabetic principle. Children attempt to translate the unfamiliar visual forms of print into familiar oral language through visual clues. They might remember the word monkey by associating the descending shape of the last letter with a monkey’s tail.

Partial alphabetic stage

Readers have now learned that letters and sounds are related, and they begin to use that insight. However, they are still unable to deal with the full complexity of the sounds in words, so they cannot make complete use of letter-sound relationships.

If readers at this stage learn that the letter sequence g-e-t is get, they may focus just on the g and the sound it represents to identify the word. However, using this strategy of focusing on the first letter, they may also read the letter sequences give, go, and gorilla as get.

Fully alphabetic stage

At this stage, even though they may never have seen it in print before, if they know the sounds commonly associated with the letters b-u-g, they can think about the sounds for each of the letters and blend them to arrive at the pronunciation of the word.

As a result of encountering the printed word bug several times, children can eventually accurately and instantly identify the word bug without attending to the individual letters, sounds, or letter-sound associations.

Consolidated alphabetic stage

Readers who recognize whole words instantly have reached the fourth stage. They also develop another valuable, attention-saving decoding skill. Not only do readers at this stage store words as units, but also repeated encounters with words allow them to store letter patterns across different words.

A multi-letter unit like –ent will be stored as a unit as a result of reading the words went, sent, and bent. Upon encountering the word dent for the first time, a consolidated alphabetic reader would need to connect only two units: d and –ent, rather than the four units that the fully alphabetic reader would need to combine.

4 Types of reading difficulties

While reading ability and becoming a fluent reader is essential, many children never acquire this skill.

According to Dr. Reid Lyon, approximately 20 to 30 percent of school-age children have difficulties learning to read. About 15 million youngsters in the US do not have access to the wonders of books and other kinds of texts for learning and enjoyment. While these estimates are alarming, they are on the conservative side.

Poor decoding

Beginner readers may struggle when they meet new or unfamiliar terms, but typically, decoding becomes easier with repeated practice of reading the text out loud. If a child continues to struggle, there may be an underlying difficulty or a physical impairment that does not allow them to hear the sounds or see the letters.

Poor fluency

To read fluently, readers need effective word recognition skills. Word recognition can be a huge obstacle for struggling readers. Average readers need to see a word four to 14 times before it becomes a “sight word” they automatically recognize. Children with dyslexia may need to see it up to 40+ times.

Poor comprehension

Someone can read fluently and still have poor comprehension, which has a clinical term: Specific Reading Comprehension Deficit (SRCD). SRCD happens when a child’s decoding skills are more developed than their ability to understand a text.

Mixed reading difficulties

Mixed reading difficulties include poor decoding, fluency, and difficulty with reading comprehension. They have challenges when it comes to reading words, retaining information, and understanding the text. These problems could be due to a reading disorder like dyslexia.

Developing reading skills

Effective reading instruction teaches reading on three levels:

(1. ) preparatory reading skills (e.g., phonological and phonemic awareness, rapid naming, processing speed)
(2.) supportive reading skills (e.g., decoding, expanding and learning new vocabulary)
(3.) reading strategies

Effective reading instruction is explicit and systematic.

Explicit teaching practices involve showing students what to do and how to do it. Strategies that emphasize silent, independent reading, for example, have not been proven to improve reading achievement.

Systematic teaching means skills and concepts are taught in a planned, logically progressive sequence. For example, certain sounds — those that are easier to learn or used more often — are taught before other sounds.

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Key takeaways

Authored by Susan du Plessis (B.A. Hons Psychology; B.D.), an educational specialist with 30+ years’ experience in the learning disabilities field.

The 5 Key Skills You Need to Master Reading

Teachers and parents today are fortunate to have access to a wealth of evidence-based research on what works in teaching children to read.

Because of this, we know that teaching children to read, their ability to learn and become proficient readers, depends on the five key skills that we bring you today.

From birth

The literacy rate of children begins to develop long before the child goes to school. Even the youngest children can begin to be prepared to successfully learn to read. Research has identified skills that are important for literacy development:

knowledge of the sound of letters
knowledge of letter names
speech sound control
remembering what was heard

Childhood

From kindergarten through grade 3, young readers actively develop all five key reading skills, from phonemic awareness to reading comprehension. Studies have shown that learning to read during this period requires a certain combination of techniques and strategies. Teachers and parents must understand how children learn and must adapt teaching methods to the individual student's abilities.

This is especially important when it comes to children who have difficulty learning to read.

1. Phonemic perception is the ability to perceive a word as a sequence of phonemes - the smallest units of sound that affect the meaning of words. Phonemes are speech sounds represented by the letters of the alphabet.

2. Phoneme decoding - the ability to identify new words by rebuilding groups of letters back into the sounds they represent, link them into a word and learn its meaning.

As challenging as reading is, thanks to advances in neuroscience and technology, we can now target key learning centers in the brain and identify areas and neural pathways that the brain uses to read. Not only do we understand why experienced readers read well and novice readers struggle with reading, but we can also help any reader on the journey from early language acquisition to reading and reading comprehension - it all happens in the brain.

Adolescence

Even though the child has already mastered the skills of phonemic perception and decoding, reading comprehension difficulties can often arise at this age. In middle and high school, literacy is formed not only in the language sphere, but also in the development of other disciplines. In order to prepare a student for high school, teachers and parents need to focus on developing the three skills necessary for reading: vocabulary, fluent reading, and reading comprehension.

Skills needed to understand the meaning of what is read:

3. Vocabulary - understanding words in a text, including the meaning of words depending on the context.

4. Fluent reading is the ability to read text easily and accurately in such a way that attention is focused on understanding the meaning of what is read, and not on reading technique.

5. Reading comprehension - the ability to analyze the meaning of each part of the text, building an understanding of the whole text, and the ability to reason about its meaning and message.

Retrieved

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Formation of reading skills in children: stages and exercises

Primary school is a special stage in the life of any child, which is associated with the formation of the basics of his ability to learn, the ability to organize his activities. It is a full-fledged reading skill that provides the student with the opportunity to independently acquire new knowledge, and in the future creates the necessary basis for self-education in subsequent education in high school and after school.

Interest in reading arises when a child is fluent in conscious reading, while he has developed educational and cognitive motives for reading. Reading activity is not something spontaneous that arises on its own. To master it, it is important to know the ways of reading, the methods of semantic text processing, as well as other skills.

Reading is a complex psychophysiological process in which visual, speech-auditory and speech-motor analyzers take part. A child who has not learned to read or does it poorly cannot comprehend the necessary knowledge and use it in practice. If the child can read, but at the same time he does not understand what he read, then this will also lead to great difficulties in further learning and, as a result, failure at school.

Reading begins with visual perception, discrimination and recognition of letters. This is the basis on the basis of which the letters are correlated with the corresponding sounds and the sound-producing image of the word is reproduced, i.e. his reading. In addition, through the correlation of the sound form of the word with its meaning, the understanding of what is read is carried out.

Stages of developing reading skills

T.G. Egorov identifies several stages in the formation of reading skills:

Mastery of sound-letter designations.
Reading by syllable.
The formation of synthetic reading techniques.
Synthetic reading.

The mastery of sound-letter designations occurs throughout the entire pre-letter and literal periods. At this stage, children analyze the speech flow, sentence, divide it into syllables and sounds. The child correlates the selected sound from speech with a certain graphic image (letter).

Having mastered the letter, the child reads the syllables and words with it. When reading a syllable in the process of merging sounds, it is important to move from an isolated generalized sound to the sound that the sound acquires in the speech stream. In other words, the syllable must be pronounced as it sounds in oral speech.

At the stage of syllable-by-syllable reading, the recognition of letters and the merging of sounds into syllables occurs without any problems. Accordingly, the unit of reading is the syllable. The difficulty of synthesizing at this stage may still remain, especially in the process of reading long and difficult words.

The stage of formation of synthetic reading techniques is characterized by the fact that simple and familiar words are read holistically, but complex and unfamiliar words are read syllable by syllable. At this stage, frequent replacements of words, endings, i.e. guessing reading takes place. Such errors lead to a discrepancy between the content of the text and the read.

The stage of synthetic reading is characterized by the fact that the technical side of reading is no longer difficult for the reader (he practically does not make mistakes). Reading comprehension comes first. There is not only a synthesis of words in a sentence, but also a synthesis of phrases in a general context. But it is important to understand that understanding the meaning of what is read is possible only when the child knows the meaning of each word in the text, i.e. Reading comprehension directly depends on the development of the lexico-grammatical side of speech.

Features of the formation of reading skills

There are 4 main qualities of reading skill:

Correct. By this is understood the process of reading, which occurs without errors that can distort the general meaning of the text.
Fluency. This is reading speed, which is measured by the number of printed characters that are read in 1 minute.
Consciousness. It implies understanding by the reader of what he reads, artistic means and images of the text.
Expressiveness. It is the ability by means of oral speech to convey the main idea of the work and one's personal attitude to it.

Accordingly, the main task of teaching reading skills is to develop these skills in schoolchildren.

All education in the primary grades is based on reading lessons. If the student has mastered the skill of reading, speaking and writing, then other subjects will be given to him much easier. Difficulties during training arise, as a rule, due to the fact that the student could not independently obtain information from books and textbooks.

Methods and exercises for developing reading skills

In educational practice, there are 2 fundamentally opposite methods of teaching reading - linguistic (the method of whole words) and phonological.

Linguistic method teaches the words that are most commonly used, as well as those that are read the same as they are written. This method is aimed at teaching children to recognize words as whole units, without breaking them into components. The child is simply shown and said the word. After about 100 words have been learned, the child is given a text in which these words are often found. In our country, this technique is known as the Glenn Doman method.

The phonetic approach is based on the alphabetic principle. Its basis is phonetics, i.e. learning to pronounce letters and sounds. As knowledge is accumulated, the child gradually moves to syllables, and then to whole words.

In addition, there are several other methods:

Zaitsev method . It involves teaching children warehouses as units of language structure. A warehouse is a pair of a consonant and a vowel (either a consonant and a hard or soft sign, or one letter). Warehouses are written on different faces of the cube, which differ in size, color, etc.
Moore method. Learning begins with sounds and letters. The whole process is carried out in a specially equipped room, where there is a typewriter that makes sounds and names of punctuation marks and numbers when a certain key is pressed. Next, the child is shown a combination of letters that he must type on a typewriter.
Montessori method. It involves teaching children the letters of the alphabet, as well as the ability to recognize, write and pronounce them. After they learn how to combine sounds into words, they are encouraged to combine words into sentences. The didactic material consists of letters that are cut out of rough paper and pasted onto cardboard plates. The child repeats the sound after the adult, after which he traces the outline of the letter with his finger.
Soboleva O.L. This method is based on the "bihemispheric" work of the brain. By learning letters, children learn them through recognizable images or characters, which makes it especially easy for children with speech disorders to learn and remember letters.

There is no universal methodology for developing reading skills. But in modern teaching methods, a general approach is recognized when learning begins with an understanding of sounds and letters, i.e. from phonetics.

There are certain exercises that help build reading skills. Here are a few of them:

Reading lines backwards letter by letter. The exercise contributes to the development of letter-by-letter analysis. The meaning is simple - the words are read in reverse order, i.e. from right to left.
Reading through the word. You do not need to read all the words in a sentence, but jumping over one.
Reading dotted words. Words are written on the cards, but some letters are missing (dotted lines are drawn instead).
Read only the second half of the word. Read only the second part of the word, the first part is omitted. The exercise contributes to the understanding that the second part of the word is no less important than the first, thereby preventing the omission (or reading with distortion) of the endings of words in the future.
Reading lines with the upper half covered. A sheet of paper is superimposed over the text so that the top of the stitching is covered.
Fast and multiple repetition. The child should repeat a line of a poem or a sentence aloud as quickly as possible and several times in a row. Correct pronunciation is extremely important, so if necessary, you need to stop and correct the child.
Find the words in the text. The child is faced with the task of finding words in the text as quickly as possible.
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