Identifying comprehension difficulty:

There are a number of indicators that can be used to flag students who will likely
require explicit instruction in reading comprehension.
➢ Learners that have or had weak oral language skills when they were in
preschool.
➢ Students that have underdeveloped word decoding skills.
➢ Learners with weak executive functioning skills, especially in working
memory which involves the use of one’s “inner eye” and “inner voice.”
➢ Learners with poor language processing abilities. They may struggle with
any of the following difficulties
➢ Semantic processing - the processing of perceiving words and placing them
in a context that allows for deeper meaning.
➢ Vocabulary - all the words known by an individual person.
➢ Inferences - the act or process of reaching a conclusion about something
from known facts or evidence.
➢ Text structure - the many ways text can be organized.
➢ Grammar - the study of the classes of words, their inflections, as well as
their functions and relations in the sentence.
Its remedy:
➢ Teach students to be active participants when reading. Exhibit aloud your
own inner voice as you use your own metacognitive skills to actively engage
in reading.
➢ Develop decoding skills to automaticity - so students have the “cognitive
space” to engage with the text.
➢ Foster a robust vocabulary by both teaching individual words as well as
how to glean the meaning of new words from the surrounding text.
➢ Teach the grammatical rules that make up language.
➢ Instruct students about the morphological structure of words so that
learners can figure out the meaning of many unknown words by evaluating
prefixes, roots, and suffixes.
➢ Illustrate higher order language skills and teach students how to question,
infer meaning, make personal connections and generate predictions.
➢ Teach students about text structure such as the setting, characters,
initiating events, problems, resolution, explicit themes, cause and effect,
compare and contrast, as well as problem and solution.
➢ Show students how to annotate text or take notes that summarize and
sequence important events.
➢ Develop each student’s ability to generate mental imagery while reading.
➢ Show learners how to create their own inner questions that can focus
attention on content and help them to make meaningful connections.
➢ Teach students how to monitor their attention and comprehension through
mindfulness practices.
➢ Do pre-reading activities that explain the meaning of key words, activate
relevant prior knowledge and generate mental imagery.
➢ Don’t feel that you have to teach all of these reading strategies to every
student that has weak comprehension skills. Instead, evaluate the needs of
each student and tailor instruction to address their specific deficits.