Reading comprehension

As we mentioned in previous weeks, reading comprehension can be an issue because of

various reasons.

- The effort of decoding may just be that there is not kind of enough mental energy left to
think about the bigger meaning of the text.

- It could be that children, who have struggled with decoding in the past, are still quite
slow at reading. Therefore, just even the pacing means that it is harder to keep the
information in their heads; they have to keep it there for longer to understand a
paragraph. So again, less energy to devote to meaning.

- There can be also instances where students have experienced failure with texts. They do
not really like texts, and so in a way they are not expecting to get enjoyment or meaning
from it. So with these children the decoding fluency may or may not be okay, but it's
actually more just they haven't developed strategies to deal with bigger text just because
they expect failure, and so they've missed out on various learning opportunities.

Different strategies that can be employed around different areas of reading comprehension.

First, we should have in mind no one size fits all. So definitely with students you're working
with, either individually or in groups, try these things out and let it be a collaborative thing. Let
the students tell you what is helpful, what is not helpful, and collaboratively build up a toolkit for
the student for different situations. Moreover, as there are many text types (narratives, newspaper
columns, recipes) and they might require slightly different strategies.

Let’s get back to the basics first.

Distilling it down to its most basic elements, reading comprehension is a combination of

word recognition and language comprehension.

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One thing we want to be doing is making sure that even if text reading in large chunks is an
effort, that we are still encouraging language comprehension and growth of oral language skills
because these would be a bolster for reading comprehension, and help the child not get too far
behind in other areas as well.

So when children are reading easily, they can use text as a way to learn vocabulary, learn about
different things, and the effort of the reading is not distracting from that. When reading is an
effort, we need to separate out when children are going to get content and ideas whereas when
they are working on text processing, in terms of opportunities to help the child absorb the ideas
without the effort of decoding. Audio books are a great tool for this and becoming increasingly
available to everyone. Having an audible account and in some countries, there are schemes
where if you have dyslexia you can get actually get free access to audio books as well. This is
always worth pursuing in the country that you are living in. Audio books are great because
students get the content the ideas, the juicy stuff, and they do not have to worry about the
decoding. So that is one thing I think is always a really good recommendation for a student, but
then also there's kind of intermediate steps.

So for example, if school is encouraging you to read books at home, if you are a parent, rather
than making the child take the whole load, you can do things where maybe you do one
paragraph, you read one paragraph aloud, and then your child reads one paragraph. Alternatively,
you can even do it line by line, depending on where your child is at. It is working out, 'when can
I take a bit of the load off so that the child can devote some energy to the content?' This is critical
both in early reading and in later reading.

I think there is always the opportunity to be a bit more creative and individualistic about -
working out what makes this child tick. And what's going to be something where they actually
really want to decode this text and find out what it is saying. So that's kind of keeping language
growing, but then, we do need to get back to text, we need to work on the text processing. And
there's things you can do as a teacher or as a parent or as a student, yourself, to help with this
process when you have a say in how text is presented, say you're creating worksheets or you're
printing things out.

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We now know that certain fonts and certain presentation can help with comprehension. So using
typically a 14 font on a computer and typically fonts that do not have kind of curves on the ends
of the letters. So sans serif we might say, and so it is fonts like Arial. Ariel is probably the most
classic. Nice straight lines. These can just help get rid of extraneous information, help access the
content. Moreover, there is emerging evidence that when you are struggling with reading,
increasing the letter spacing can be a useful tool. You can do this through the line pitch options
within your Word processor. Also double lines, so spacing things out is always going to be
useful.

Now let's imagine we're presenting a student with a text that we're hoping that they can take
away some useful information from. So what can we do even before the child tried to tackle the
text, which they might have quite a lot of trepidation around. We can scaffold this in a couple of
ways.

First of all, we can do some verbal talk around the topic. Again, kind of putting the text to the
side just for a moment and activating the verbal knowledge. So, asking the child what they know
about this topic, already, and also potentially pre-viewing some of the key words that may be in
the text so they're not going to struggle with them, they're not going to be a barrier to
comprehension when they're trying to read the whole thing. You can actually do some pre-
viewing. And so that then when they see those words they recognize them. It may, it may be that
you are helping the child note the meaning of those or maybe that they know the meaning so you
are just helping them kind of access that already. So have a conversation. 'What are we expecting
here?'

There's also a framework that's really quite well known: the K W L framework.

- What do I know in this area?

- What do I want to learn?
- What have I actually learnt?

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So you can see with a strategy like this, it's really bringing, making explicit, what skilled readers
are doing naturally is fairly unconscious level. However, if reading is a struggle, we have to
make these strategies explicit because otherwise, they are not likely to be used and it just helps
give it an extra tool. So, pre-reading, so we're going to kind of activate prior knowledge, we're
going to help prepare and prime for certain words that might be coming up. So now, the child
can go into this text with a level of confidence, hopefully.

So now, let us move into what do we do, the child is now in the text.

We might need a different group of strategies. Self correction and definitely self are really key in
comprehension. Again, skilled readers are doing it automatically, without thinking. If you do not
understand something, you might re-read the sentence, you might look back further, you might
go to a dictionary and say, I do not know that word. If you are struggling to just get through the
text, you may not be doing those things. So again, we are just really making implicit strategies
explicit.

So work with a student to maybe come up with an interval maybe every paragraph, maybe every
few sentences, where they stop and ask themselves, 'okay what did that just say?' Sometimes
they might want to orally summarize to you what the sentence has said, at least in the initial
stages to get this strategy working. Or just questions about what the text is really meaning or
what someone is referring to. So get into a pattern of first with lots of modeling from yourself or
another person who can do this. Make your own comprehension process explicit, and then help
the student learn that too. At first, it will not be automatic at all, but we are really aiming here for
this to become something the student can kind of take on and use themselves with a variety of
texts.

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