Here’s another excerpt from Explicit Language! (reading & spelling strategies for teachers of teens and adults)
A Word About Comprehension
Most of the criticism that I’ve heard about phonic-based reading programmes is that there is no room for comprehension, that students are taught to “bark at print” with no regard for the meaning of the words they are decoding. It is more than obvious that the only reason for a teenager or adult to be reading is to get meaning from the text. However, the extent to which this is successful is related to how much is understood at word level.
Level 1
Understands the word when listening, recognises and understands the word when reading and uses the word comfortably in conversation.
Level 2
Understands the word when listening but doesn’t “just know” the word when reading. Can understand it if able to decode it.
Level 3
Doesn’t understand a word when it’s used in speech and therefore finds no meaning even if able to decode the word perfectly.
For most of us, the majority of words that we come across in speech and print fall into Level 1. For struggling readers, that level is usually severely restricted. Many (even most) of the words that are in Level 1 for us will be Level 2 or even Level 3 for our students.
Make sense of the following:
Most older struggling readers are sesquipedaphobic
I would bet a month’s wages that the last word falls into Level 3 for most teachers. How do you make sense of it? If your Latin is better than mine, you might guess that it’s the fear of big feet—but that seems a bit odd for the context. To get any meaning from the sentence, you will have to look it up in the dictionary or ask someone. (See page 40 for the answer.)
Now here’s a word that you’ve heard but it’s written in a way that will force you to segment each sound until you can “hear” it in your head.
ekszajirait
That’s much more like the experience of a struggling reader who is trying to read a word that they don’t recognize by sight but which is in their spoken vocabulary. The huge challenge is to help students increase their vocabularies so that they can continue to read more and more.
Our students will read better when they have richer vocabularies. They will develop better vocabularies as they listen to new words and use them in speech. (Anyone want to start a Conversation Club?)