Building Young Learners’ Reading Comprehension

FE S. CARREON

Children learn to read in different ways and at different speeds. Some children may come late to reading or may struggle with it for a long time. When we think of reading issues, we often imagine children who struggle to decode the letters in text and turn them into spoken language.

This type of struggling reader has a very difficult time figuring out what many of the words are and has poor phonological or speech-sound skills. However, there are also many students who sound like they’re reading beautifully but have difficulty with understanding vocabulary and figurative language, inferencing, verbal reasoning, grammatical development, and oral expr essi on.

As children get older, if they are decoding text well we assume they are reading well. Once a person learns to decode, reading comprehension becomes more about language comprehension and focus. At this transition, starting around third grade, teachers may begin to notice some students who decode text fluently but are not understanding.

Since this type of struggling reader is less noticeable than ones who have difficulty decoding, they often slip under the radar until they begin to fail standardized state comprehension tests. Even then, their issues may go undetected for a long time, resulting in middle and high school students who sound like they’re reading but understand nothing that they have read. These struggling readers should be targeted for reevaluation, and the earlier the better.

To support students who have difficulty in reading, teachers can bring a lot of help by implementing different strategies. One of the most important is to target overall comprehension of language.

Many research reveals that reading comprehension difficulties may stem from an underlying oral language weakness that exists from early childhood, before reading is even taught. It turns out that students who have poor reading comprehension also often understand fewer spoken words and less of what they hear, and have worse spoken grammar.

So to address reading comprehension deficits effectively, educators may have to use an approach that teaches vocabulary, thinking skills, and comprehension first in spoken language and then in reading and written language.

Moreover, it is essential that we teach our young learners vocabulary. Students with poor comprehension often have poor vocabulary skills and understand less of what they hear. It’s helpful to teach the meanings of new words through the use of multisensory strategies like pictures and mnemonics. Improving their overall language skills increases the likelihood that they will understand the words they encounter in written text.

Lastly, it is important that we directly teach comprehension skills, such as sequencing, story structure using the plot mountain, how to make an inference and draw a conclusion, and the different types of figurative language. Students should have the opportunity to first use the skills with text that they hear the teacher read aloud, and then later with text that they read independently at their own level.

These abovementioned comprehension skills and strategies can be used with the whole class, as they closely align with reading and language standards for elementary and high school students. Teachers can help students select reading material with vocabulary that matches their current ability levels so that within the class, students are reading text and working on vocabulary at levels that are accessible for each of them.

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The author is Teacher III at Cabetican Elementary School - Proper