Is your child experiencing comprehension difficulties?
At LAB Learning Clinic we help children with comprehension based learning difficulties to overcome their barriers to learning.
Comprehension: The Goal of Reading
Comprehension means understanding text: spoken, written and/or visual. Readers who have strong comprehension are able to draw conclusions about what they read – what is important, what is a fact, what caused an event to happen, which characters are funny.
Comprehension, or extracting meaning from what you read, is the ultimate goal of reading. When we comprehend what we read we are able to understand, learn and apply the knowledge learned. Experienced readers may take this for granted and not understand the complex skills required to be proficient at comprehension.
The process of comprehension is both interactive and strategic. Rather than passively reading text, readers must analyse it, internalise it and make it their own. Learners require explicit instruction, modelling and practice in order to make meaning of text.
Comprehension involves:
- Understanding vocabulary (knowing the meanings of words)
- Linking information to prior knowledge
- Simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning from text
- Deriving meaning from text as the reader engages in intentional, problem solving and thinking processes
- Making predictions about the information or characters or events
- Identifying main ideas and supporting information
- Making inferences about text when it is not explicitly stated in the text
- Visualising. Studies have shown that students who visualise while reading have better recall than those who do not.
What are the signs of a comprehension based reading difficulty?
- Difficulty retelling what happened in a story
- Can’t explain how a character might be feeling and why
- Difficulties identifying the main idea or summarising facts
- Difficulty predicting what might happen next
At LAB Learning Clinic we develop strategies for learners to access when reading different types of text .
We develop reading comprehension strategies for understanding expository texts.
Expository texts explain facts and concepts in order to inform, persuade, or explain.
We develop reading strategies for understanding narrative texts.
Narrative text tells a story, either a true story or a fictional story. Understanding narratives is complex and involves understanding the following:
- Setting: When and where the story takes place (which can change over the course of the story).
- Characters: The people or animals in the story, including the protagonist (main character), whose motivations and actions drive the story.
- Plot: The story line, which typically includes one or more problems or conflicts that the protagonist must address and ultimately resolve.
- Theme: The overriding lesson or main idea that the author wants readers to glean from the story. It could be explicitly stated as in Aesop’s Fables or inferred by the reader (more common).
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