Reading is Comprehension
Many parents have asked for help in working with their children's reading. We have compiled some information and suggestions that we hope you find useful in helping your child in becoming an independent, fluent reader.
As we work with children's literacy in general and especially those who have difficulty with reading, we have made many observations. The most obvious observation is that children who believe they are not good readers have focused most of their efforts on word-perfect reproduction.
They think that reading means saying all of the words right. Making text sound as it was written is an important aspect of reading, but reading is to construct meaning, and even adult proficient readers do not "say all the words right!"
The reading process involves more than that. It concentrates more on how readers use sound/symbol relationships (phonics), syntax (grammar), and semantics (meaning) in concert to develop an understanding of text.
What Adult Proficient Readers Do
As adult proficient readers, we do not perfectly recreate the text when we read. Instead, as we sample the words in the text, we automatically use all of our general background knowledge and our expectations of what we think the text will say based on pictures, titles, headings, etc.; we reflect on our previous experiences in general and with this type of text; and we consider our purpose for reading it.
Based on all of this, we make predictions about what we think the text will say. We only sample enough print for it to make sense to us, and when it does, we read on. For example, the sentence says: "The horse ran down the road." and we predict: "The pony ran down the road." It has made perfect sense to us based on the previously listed criteria and we read on.
However, if we predict: " The house ran down the road," readers reading for meaning will know that the sentence does not make sense, and they will need to reread that part of the text that was not meaningful or read on to try to figure out the meaning of the unknown word, phrase, or concept. This is a description of what an adult proficient reader does, all in a matter of seconds.
What Is Important
It is important that your reader is aware that reading should make sense and sound like language and, if it does not, there are strategies other than sounding out or asking for help that will move him/her along in text and help it make sense.