Comprehension - Mrs Badcock
Literacy-The Big 6
COMPREHENSION
Research has shown that there are six key components that contribute to successful reading and because of the importance of these components, they have become known as the 'Big Six’: oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. The reading components of our school reading program focus on the Big Six.
Comprehension
Comprehension is about understanding the authors’ messages and responding to these messages in a variety of ways. Not only do children need to have accurate word recognition skills (decoding) but they also need to have good language comprehension. Language comprehension includes background concepts, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning and literacy knowledge.
How does comprehension contribute to reading success?
Comprehension links to oral language as students engage in discussions about what they understand from texts. Having a strong vocabulary, knowing the meaning of words, supports comprehension because readers do not have to stop and seek support with unknown words. Secure letter-sound knowledge and sight word recognition allows takes away the processing demands at the sound and word level and assists allows for focus on the meaning. Reading with fluency which includes reading smoothly at an appropriate rate, with accuracy and with prosody (stress, expression, intonation and punctuation) indicates that children are reading with understanding.
Comprehension at school
Comprehension is developed by explicit instruction, modelling and practise through the following:
- Systematic and explicit instruction on comprehension strategies including activating prior knowledge, predicting, identifying the main idea, visualising, summarising, inferring and questioning.
- Understanding the intention of what is expected after reading a text.
- Reading a variety of text types including fiction and non-fiction.
- Oral reading and silent reading.
- High frequency word recognition.
- Letter-sound relationships.
What can parents and caregivers do at home to encourage comprehension development?
Children's reading comprehension development is dependent on consistent, nurturing and interacting learning experiences with adults and peers.
Here are some ways parents and caregivers can encourage comprehension:
- Talk to and with your child to develop their language comprehension.
- Ask your child to explain the text to you in their own words. This allows you to see if they understand the text and putting it in their own words helps them to understand.
- Ask them questions during reading such as Are there any words you don’t understand?, What do you think this page is about?, What do we know about the characters?
- Ask them questions after reading which include literal and inferential questions.
- Focus on learning sight words, the Oxford 500 to develop fluency.