The Correlation Between Reading & Reading Comprehension
There is a direct correlation between a student’s academic success to their reading and reading comprehension skills. Failure to develop reading skills and comprehension of text read will critically affect a students performance in academia and beyond.
What are the Four Essential Skills Needed for Reading?
- The ability to decode text This skills relies on a students basic phonemic awareness.
- The ability to read fluently Reading fluently requires that the student recognizes all words, this includes words they are unable to phonetically sound out. Fluent readers do so with a smooth cadence and by combining words to aid with meaning.
- Phonemic awareness The ability to connect letters and sounds. Click here for a list of the basic phonetic sounds.
- The identification of commonly used words Word recognition can be a great struggle for some students. The recognition process may occasionally lead to students ‘guessing’ at words while reading.
What are the Six Essential Skills Needed for Reading Comprehension?
- Decoding This skills relies on a students basic phonemic awareness. As stated above to connect letters and sounds.
- Fluency Reading fluently requires that the student have the ability to recognize all words, this includes words they are unable to phonetically sound out. Fluent readers do so with a smooth cadence and by combining words to aid with meaning.
- Vocabulary Having a robust vocabulary is in an important key for students reading comprehension skill. The more words a child is exposed to, the more robust their vocabulary becomes. Click here to read more about vocabulary.
- Sentence construction and cohesion Strong reading and writing skills go hand in hand with one another. Specifically, the understanding of how sentences are formed and connected.
- Reasoning and background knowledge It is within our nature to make correlations between new information and what we already know. Like a robust vocabulary a plethora of experiences and dialogue about the activity. This is a wonderful opportunity to students real world examples of implicit and explicit text.
- Attention, working memory, and self-monitoring Attention and working memory are closely related and part of the executive function abilities. However, some believe the glue that holds the two together is self-monitoring. When reading, attention enables students to collect information in text. Through working memory they hold onto all the collected information like pieces of a puzzle, gain knowledge from each piece collected, and build knowledge with each puzzle piece like a lovely landscape.
How do WiSHES Tutoring Staff help students to improve their reading and reading comprehension by:
- Providing opportunities for interactive reading and decoding strategies.
- Aid students in improving their visual and auditory processing skills.
- Help participants understand what they are reading by building robust vocabulary.
- To increase attention we determine the students interests and provide reading materials onsite and through electronic platforms that students find interesting and motivating.
- Encourage students to become engaged writers while developing reading comprehension skills.
The reading and reading comprehension skills listed above are developed and calibrated over a period of many years. Any child that masters these skills will over time become a more proficient reader. In reading proficiency, the goal is that as a child gets older they are reading at or above grade level and that their reading comprehension progressively improves. Because the skills listed above are continually developing, over many years our reading and reading comprehension program contains the same fundamental components for all grade levels in accordance with the Common Core Standards of Ohio.
