Reading comprehension: complete guide for speech therapists
Reading comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading: reading to understand. It mobilizes both decoding skills, vocabulary, general knowledge and inferential abilities. Some children decode correctly but struggle to understand what they read. This guide presents comprehension processes and intervention strategies.
📖 Resources for reading comprehension
Texts with questions, reading strategies, inference exercises
Access tools →📋 Table of Contents
Reading comprehension processes
Understanding a text involves constructing a coherent mental representation of the content. This requires:
- Fluent decoding: reading words effortlessly
- Vocabulary: knowing the meaning of words
- Syntax: understanding sentence structure
- Inferences: deducing what is not explicit
- General knowledge: activating relevant schemas
- Self-monitoring: monitoring one's own understanding
Comprehension difficulties
Difficulty profiles
- Decoding problem: laborious reading prevents comprehension
- Pure comprehension problem: correct decoding but difficulty constructing meaning
- Mixed problem: both difficulties
Possible causes
- Insufficient vocabulary
- Oral comprehension difficulties (basis of written language)
- Inferential difficulties
- Limited working memory
- Lack of knowledge on the subject
- Absence of active reading strategies
Assessment
- Oral comprehension: check the language foundation
- Reading fluency: is decoding sufficient?
- Literal questions: explicit information in the text
- Inferential questions: information to be deduced
- Text recall: retelling what was read
Intervention strategies
💡 Active reading strategies
- Before: activate knowledge, anticipate, set a goal
- During: visualize, ask questions, make connections
- After: summarize, react, evaluate understanding
Work areas
- Vocabulary: enrich the lexicon
- Inferences: explicit training
- Text structure: identify important information
- Metacognition: monitor comprehension, reread if necessary
- Visualization: create a mental movie
Our downloadable tools
Frequently asked questions
This is the profile of a "good decoder poor comprehender". The causes can be: insufficient vocabulary, inferential difficulties, lack of general knowledge, underlying oral comprehension difficulty, or absence of active reading strategies. A speech therapy assessment will identify the cause.
If decoding is laborious, it must first be made more fluent as it "blocks" comprehension. But oral comprehension can be worked on in parallel (texts read to the child). When decoding is fluent, written comprehension is specifically targeted.
