Comprehension is the last bit of knowledge and ability to be or become a strong reader. It is last because if a learner does not have an accurate AND automatic foundation in both Phonemic Awareness and Phonics or Phonological Awareness then they will not be able to read fast enough to remember what they have read. Or if they are able to read fast enough, but the majority of their brain power is going to figure out what the letters on the page are actually saying, they will not have the mental energy to put into discovering the meaning of what they are reading. It is still one of the main building blocks of reading because it is vital for reading success. After all if you can read anything and read it quickly, but then can remember or tell nothing about what you read, what good is it!?! Simply put, comprehension is the ability to recall and understand something. In our case the ability to remember and understand something we have read.

This pillar of reading is the one I feel the least knowledgable about. It’s the one I feel the least competent to help students with. However, I am developing a greater knowledge of it as I learn more about the other pillars of reading and as I teach more students how to read. I also think that one of the reasons it is so hard to help my middle school students with it is because, for them, reading has become this completely compartmentalized thing. The phonemic awareness and phonological parts have been so hard for them for so long that they have spent all of their energy just trying to read/figure out the words on the page and they have never even really tried to understand those words. Also, some of how we teach and assess their reading has lent itself to this idea. Students develop a way of thinking that says you can read just to get the words off the page, but not to learn anything. But, if a child never reads just to get words out, like on a DIBLES test. Or if that is never the only kind of reading they do AND their reading often or always includes questioning or discussion of what was read, then they automatically have a habit of comprehension. And they realize that it is an expected part of reading.

I know that comprehension can be broken down into sub-skills like main idea, comparing and contrasting, summarizing, and more. And I honestly think, from my experience as a teacher, that this breaking apart of comprehension is what makes the overall skill of comprehending so muddy and hard to, well, comprehend. If a person can read a book and tell you all about it, if they can tell you what the author’s point in writing it was, some of the key parts and share their personal take aways from it, then they comprehended it. They may not answer one specific question about the book accurately, but still be able to do all of the aforementioned things. And, so again, even though their answer to that one question was incorrect, I would still say they were successful in comprehending what they read. But, if we break all of the questions down and label each one with a specific sub-skill of comprehension then all of a sudden because of one missed question there is a problem with their comprehension. All of a sudden, because of one missed question, this person can’t summarize or infer or whatever the sub-skill attached to the question was.

Partly because of this and partly because of my experiences with children, I feel like it is better to teach and work on comprehension as a whole. Then yes, if over time and looking at several different kinds of writings (articles, books, passages, essays, excerpts, poems, advertisements) you see a pattern emerging that shows that a learner is struggling in one area of comprehension, then you may want to focus on working only on that one sub-skill. However, if we are in the habit of teaching comprehension as a whole then we will be exposing learners to all the sub-skills of comprehension in a myriad AND multitude of ways. And that, the repetition and different types of exposure and practice, will be the best thing to get them to proficiency in comprehension as a whole.

I feel like we in education work hard to break every overarching skill we deem necessary down into as tiny of parts as possible. And I totally understand the thought process behind this. If all we know is that a learner struggles with comprehension, how are we supposed to fix it? Because maybe they can answer any question about the reading that was explicitly mentioned in the text, but anything that they have to figure out on their own is a complete mystery. Well, like we discussed in the above paragraph, we don’t want to unfairly say they can’t comprehend when really they just can’t infer. So, there are very valuable things that can be gained when we break big skills into smaller ones. Unfortunately, what I see happening is that we are not just breaking big skills into tiny skills to understand where a learner has gone astray, but we are also breaking big skills into tiny skills when we are teaching students. The result is that we now have 10 lessons to teach instead of one on a skill. Before we could have read a novel to the class and talked about main idea and perspective, about summarizing and inferencing and all the other things that go into comprehension as we read. Now, the teacher rarely has time to read a full novel to their class AND have rich discussion about what they are reading. And it’s this rich discussion that generates learning in all of these sub-skills! They don’t have time because they have to teach a myriad of mini-lessons on each sub-skill of comprehension. They may have to teach a main idea lesson with these 10 excerpt paragraphs. After that they need to teach inferencing with a Brain Pop video. They will also need to teach basic comprehension with recall questions on the Science article they just read. Then they will use summary to talk about the article they read next week. They’ll be waiting to summarize until next week because there are four more main idea lessons with excerpts that have to be taught this week, and we can’t confuse the students with too many skills at one time. The thing is that none of these sub-skills were ever meant to be a stand alone ability. They are just part of strong comprehension ability.

Therefore, I think that comprehension should be broken down into it’s sub-skills when assessing a student who is struggling with comprehension. BUT, I think that all of the sub-skills should be taught together in as organic (naturally occurring) of opportunities as possible.

The other big take away that I KEEP getting with each of these pillars of reading from the Science of Reading is the importance of spoken or verbal language in ALL of the pillars. It is no less important with comprehension. Before a student can comprehend what they read they have to be able to comprehend what they hear. I have encountered a very few students who have a much higher comprehension ability with what they read than with what they hear. BUT, this is rare and an exception rather than the rule. If you look at dyslexic students for example, who often struggle with and are behind in reading, their oral comprehension abilities are generally excellent and often far above their age or grade level. This means that although, they may have a terrible time reading a book and telling you anything about what they read (even a very short passage), if they listen to an audio book they can often tell you all about it, even if that book is above their grade level. This is also why young children can retell chapter books when they can barely sound out cvc (consonant, vowel, consonant) words like cat.

Remember, we develop our oral language before we read. AND we repurpose some of those language areas of our brain for the task of reading. That is why children should always be exposed to texts that are above their current reading and even learning levels. They need this exposure to scaffold their oral language development. And the more developed their oral language is, the stronger their foundation for learning to read and read well.

My current main take aways about comprehension are as follows. First, if a child struggles with oral comprehension they are likely to struggle with reading comprehension. Second, we must teach comprehension as a whole including conversations about things read by the students AND to the students that ask them to summarize, infer, compare and contrast and all of the other comprehension tasks. Third, as with all reading skills, oral language needs to be a large part of learners instruction in comprehension. We need to talk about what we read to them, they need to talk about what they read to themselves, and they need to read out loud. Fourth, without an adequate oral vocabulary, students will struggle with reading comprehension. And lastly, if students have not developed accuracy AND automaticity in Phonemic and Phonological Awareness they will not be able to read fluently enough to support their reading comprehension.