Reading Comprehension: A Complete Guide for Speech Therapists
Reading comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading: reading to understand. It involves decoding skills, vocabulary, general knowledge, and inferential abilities. Some children decode correctly but struggle to understand what they read. This guide presents the processes of comprehension and intervention strategies.
📖 Resources for Reading Comprehension
Texts with questions, reading strategies, inference exercises
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Reading Comprehension Processes
Understanding a text involves building a coherent mental representation of the content. This requires:
- Fluent decoding: reading words effortlessly
- Vocabulary: knowing the meanings 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
Profiles of Difficulties
- Decoding problem: laborious reading hinders comprehension
- Pure comprehension problem: correct decoding but difficulty constructing meaning
- Mixed problem: both difficulties
Possible Causes
- Insufficient vocabulary
- Oral comprehension difficulties (foundation of written language)
- Inferential difficulties
- Limited working memory
- Lack of knowledge about 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 deduce
- Text recall: recount what has been 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 Focus Areas
- Vocabulary: enrich the lexicon
- Inferences: explicit training
- Text structure: identify important information
- Metacognition: monitor understanding, reread if necessary
- Visualization: create a mental movie
Our Downloadable Tools
🔍 Inference Exercises
Texts with inferential questions.
Download📚 Texts with Questions
Literal and inferential comprehension.
Download📖 Narrative Support
Narrative structure for analyzing texts.
Download📚 Vocabulary Cards
Lexical enrichment.
DownloadFrequently Asked Questions
This is the profile of a "good decoder weak comprehender". Possible causes may include: insufficient vocabulary, inferential difficulties, lack of general knowledge, underlying oral comprehension difficulties, or absence of active reading strategies. A speech therapy assessment will identify the cause.
If decoding is laborious, it should be made fluent first as it "blocks" comprehension. However, we can work on oral comprehension in parallel (texts read to the child). When decoding is fluent, we specifically work on written comprehension.
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