These are the series of steps involved in taking in, demystifying, and understanding a message—written or oral. Have you ever used a grade calculator?
Skilled reading isn’t possible without language comprehension. Readers might have extensive background knowledge on a topic or strong oral language skills, but if they cannot read the words on a page, it might affect their ability to learn from or understand a book on the topic. On the other hand, students who easily decode a word but have never heard it before or don’t know what it means will also struggle to comprehend. According to Scarborough’s Rope model, language comprehension and word recognition are two strands that combine together and lead to skilled reading.
Smaller strands that form language comprehension include:
Background knowledge: Students learn more from a text and understand it better when they’ve got some familiarity with the topic. Teachers can help students develop background knowledge by encouraging them to establish connections to their earlier experiences and related knowledge. Can you use a high school GPA calculator? Teachers can also intentionally introduce and discuss new information and connect it to students’ existing knowledge.
Literacy knowledge: Students come to school with varying levels of literacy knowledge. Some might flip confidently through books, pointing to some occasional familiar words. But they can still benefit from rich discussion of concepts of print and structures of various genres alongside explicit teaching. Print awareness plays a crucial role in students’ literacy development and can even predict their future reading achievement. Narrative texts and informational texts include common elements and follow predictable patterns. Having a sense of what to anticipate in a text depending on its genre gives students a framework for comprehension.
Vocabulary knowledge: Students will have difficulty understanding a text if they don’t know what individual words in that text mean. Teachers can use lots of opportunities to observe, discuss, and model the utilization of words throughout the school day.
Language structures: In any language, including English, words and sentences merge in predictable patterns. Those patterns make up the language’s grammar, including capitalization, punctuation, word usage, word order, and verb tense.
Verbal reasoning: Most of the learning students do in school depends on understanding what they read, understanding what teachers say, or both. From following instructions in kindergarten and learning to read to deciphering complicated text in upper grades and beyond, verbal reasoning lets students problem-solve around words and understand concepts.
Concluding Thoughts
Skilled reading is impossible without language comprehension, which in turn is composed of smaller strands, including background knowledge, literacy knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, language structures, and verbal reasoning. If any of these strands is missing, comprehension is unachievable. By understanding the meaning of individual words and the rules informing the language structure, the student is able to anticipate what is in the textIf there is no background information, the teacher’s duty is to provide this context. Through the teacher’s words or what is read in the text, the student employs verbal reasoning to understand. In essence, the strands of language comprehension are connected, working in tandem to achieve one single purpose.