Poor reading comprehension

What is poor reading comprehension? 
 
Reading comprehension refers to the ability to understand, interpret and reflect upon the meaning of what is being read. Children who have been found to have problems with comprehension are sometimes referred to as poor comprehenders. The condition seems to be relatively common and it has been estimated that one child in ten has some comprehension problems. As the usual focus of teachers is on poor readers, poor comprehenders sometimes go undetected in class as they are fluent and accurate readers with normal decoding abilities. Although reading comprehension is not as well researched as dyslexia, for example, it is generally agreed that it involves range of skills, such as:
 

1. decoding (ability to read words);
2. vocabulary knowledge (knowing the meaning of a wide range of words);
3. grammatical awareness (ability to understand the structure of sentence and the meaning of composing it words);
4. listening comprehension (understanding what is being said);
5. pragmatic skills, which help to make inferences about intended by the writer meaning and thus interpret the text appropriately;
6. general knowledge, which helps to make links with what the child knows from real life or other texts to the current text;
7. comprehension monitoring (planning the activity of reading, ability to monitor the understanding of the read text and to get back to the point when the comprehension was lost, ability to reflect on what was just read and extract the main points in text);
8. working memory (here it refers to ability to simultaneously store verbal information while it is processed);

 
 
What are the causes of poor comprehension?
 
The causes behind problems in poor comprehenders are still open to discussion, but it has been proposed that problems with reading comprehension are preceded by problems with spoken language comprehension. However, the picture is rarely neat and probably the problem of poor reading comprehension might reflect interplay of different factors rather than a single cause. It has been generally agreed that verbal ability is heritable, and since comprehension is strongly linked to verbal ability, it is likely that there is some genetic influence underlying occurrence of poor comprehension. There is also some evidence that there are some differences in brain anatomy between poor comprehenders and individuals with dyslexia, for example. However, this has to be still more researched to confirm the findings.
 
 
What types of difficulties poor comprehenders might face?
 
The types of difficulties that are associated with poor comprehension involve problems with the following:
 

1. summarizing passages of text;
2. inferring and remembering the meaning of new words;
3. predicting what might happen next in the story;
4. deeper inference about intended by the writers meaning (e.g. why the characters acted/felt/thought in particular way);
5. suppressing irrelevant information in order to extract the main message;
6. monitoring the comprehension and re-reading the passage in which attention has broken down;
7. linking ideas from different parts of the text;
8. linking events in the text to events from real life or another book;
9. creating mental images of what is read;
10. low confidence about ones comprehension skills which might lead to low self-esteem; 

 
What are the available interventions?
 
Although still limited there are number of interventions that have been developed to help children to overcome some problems associated with poor comprehension. Successful interventions which target comprehension skills include both written and oral language problems as well as confidence and motivation in children. They might include, amongst others, the following:
 

1. extending vocabularyby introducing drawings depicting the word’s meaning (especially words which meaning if difficult to remember) and then encourage the students to use and revisit them frequently;
2. using bubble diagrams to extend the words meaning and facilitate better understanding;
3. using games such as prediction bingo, which help to built predicting ability about events and ideas that might happen as well as help to build confidence to share these ideas;
4. improving summarizing skills by introducing prompt sheets, which invite the child to advertize a story, for example (these help the child to look for the main message/event in the story) or graphic organizers, which capture the main points and events within a story;

 
 What parents can do to help at home?
 
Children with poor comprehension might benefit from the following activities held at home:
 
 

1. after reading a story parent can discus the events and characters by asking questions about them, asking what the character might feel/think and why the child think thinks things happen the way they did in the story;
2. additionally, the parent might refer the events in the story to the child’s life/another book/movie and ask the child to judge how they might be related to the other experience;
3. discuss the meaning of unknown words in text or in everyday life;
4. help the child to monitor her/his reading, this could be done by reading short passages and then checking frequently understanding of what he/she is reading;
5. asking the child to form mental image (picture in her/his head) of the event/character/place from the story.

 
Final thoughts
 
Although there is still a lot we do not know about the Reading Comprehension Impairment, interventions developed to date give a positive picture of what can be done to help the children to overcome their problems. Giving lots of attention, patience and facilitating the child’s growth in comprehension skills as well as confidence and motivation can go a long way in their way to academic achievement.