Introduction to comprehension
Skilled reading depends on both word reading and language comprehension, as the ‘Reading Rope’ diagram by psychologist and literacy expert Hollis Scarborough illustrates:
‘Reading Rope’ diagram from Peggy McCardle, Hollis S Scarborough and Hugh W Catts: ‘Predicting, Explaining and Preventing Children’s Reading Difficulties’, Learning Disabilities Research & Practice 16:4 (2001), copyright © 2001 The Division for Learning Disabilities of the Council for Exceptional Children.
Scarborough makes it clear that both knowledge and skills support the development of word reading accuracy and comprehension. To be successful in understanding what they read (that is, to comprehend it), children need to develop accurate and automatic word reading skills as well as purposeful and accurate text processing strategies in order to extract meaning.
Scarborough, H. (2001) ‘Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice’, in S. B. Newman and D. D. Dickinson. (eds.) Handbook of early literacy research, New York: Guilford Press, pp. 97–110.
Reading comprehension is the ability to read text, process it and understand
its meaning.
When we read and understand a text, we do not remember the precise wording or structure. Instead, readers and listeners construct a representation of what the text describes. They integrate the sense of the words and sentences into a meaningful whole, drawing on the words but also any pictures or diagrams, often requiring inference to fill in the gaps, and very often some background knowledge. When the information in the mental model they are creating has been successfully integrated, comprehension ‘clicks’.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983) Mental models: towards a cognitive science of language, inference, and consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
According to the model of the Simple View of Reading, reading is the product of two processes: word recognition and language comprehension. Both are essential for reading comprehension to occur.
Simple view of reading diagram from D Shankweiler et al: ‘Comprehension and decoding: Patterns of association in children with reading difficulties, Scientific Studies of Reading 3:1 (1999), copyright © Routledge 1999, used by permission of Taylor & Francis via Copyright Clearance Center.
Good word recognition makes an important contribution to the ease and quality of reading comprehension. Good comprehenders can decode printed words accurately, efficiently and fluently. Children with word reading problems (such as dyslexia) will read the text more slowly and may not decode all of the critical words accurately. They often have significant deficits in reading comprehension.
Shankweiler, D., Lundquist, E., Katz, L., Stuebing, K. K., Fletcher, J. M., Brady, S., Shaywitz, B. A. (1999) ‘Comprehension and decoding: Patterns of association in children with reading difficulties’, Scientific Studies of Reading, 3, pp. 69–94.
Beyond word recognition, language comprehension is important and is supported by a range of skills. To understand a text by ear or by eye, comprehenders need to access the meanings of words, assemble them into meaningful clauses and sentences, and integrate the meaning of these sentences into a coherent integrated representation of the text’s meaning. To make full sense of the text and construct this meaning-based representation, readers and listeners often need to engage in inference making – that is, going beyond the details explicitly stated by the author – to integrate ideas, and draw on their background knowledge to fill in missing, but essential, details. One example of inference making is when we resolve a pronoun such as ‘she’, by making a link to the character in the text to which it refers. Another example is when we encode specific meanings when more general terms are used, for example inferring that a small furry animal that wags its tail and barks is most likely a dog.
Gough, P. and Tunmer, W. (1986) ‘Decoding, reading, and reading disability’, Remedial and Special Education, 7, pp. 6–10.
Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension: A handbook by Jane Oakhill, Kate Cain and Carsten Elbro (Routledge, 2014) provides a more detailed overview of the nature of comprehension.