Reading Comprehension

Here’s another excerpt from TRT for Teachers

A Word About Comprehension

A person’s ability to understand what they are reading is directly linked to their speaking and listening vocabularies. When it comes to vocabulary, a person can be rich, surviving or poor.

Rich
Has a large speaking and listening vocabulary and “just knows” the majority of words when reading.

Surviving
Has a reasonable speaking and listening vocabulary but doesn’t “just know” those words when reading. Can attach meaning to a word when able to decode.

Poor
Has a limited spoken vocabulary so that learning to decode doesn’t necessarily lead to increased comprehension. These students need masses of conversation and other help to increase their speaking and listening vocabularies. Otherwise, they can appear to be “barking at print”.

Literate people are vocabulary rich—though some are richer than others.

Strugglers are either surviving or poor. Those with survival level vocabularies improve very quickly once they master good decoding strategies. However, the vocabulary poor take a long time to improve and depend on carefully chosen texts with simple vocabulary. They are a real challenge.