The Importance Of Comprehension In Children

According to Marian Webster dictionary comprehension is “The act or action of grasping with intellect.” Comprehension is one of the most important things for a child to learn. Without comprehension a child, or even an adult for that matter will not understand what they are reading. To start off my research, I found an article that related to my field of study, special education. In the article titled “Developing an intervention to improve reading comprehension for children and young people with autism spectrum disorder” by Turner, Remington, and Hill I learned quite a few statistics about comprehension and how little students with autism spectrum disorder know when it comes to comprehension. “The prevalence of individuals demonstrating reading

According to “Kindergartners Can Do It, Too! Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers” by Anne Gregory and Mary Cahill, comprehension should be taught in kindergarten since this is when youngsters are creating schemas. Schemas are how people sort what they know. As children develop their schemas grow with them. Teaching student’s comprehension while their schemas are expanding is a great idea. While teaching students how to read fluently, teach them how to make connections, visualize, ask question, and how to make inferences. If this is taught to children as they learn how too fluently it will expand their “how to read” schema. The idea of how schema could help comprehension that the article provided could lead to many discoveries. Teaching comprehension at this age and getting students to actively ask questions and make inferences will help them excel in future classes. Teaching this at this young age may also solve the problem of reading for speed. Students now a days see how fast they can accurately read a passage, but the problem is they don’t comprehend it. Teaching students how to comprehend as we teach them to read could have amazing long term

Another form is a slow reader. Now a slow reader does not have a disability per se, but they simply can nor read at a “normal” pace. According to the article “Effects of Applying Repeated Readings Method on Reading Fluency and Passage comprehension of Slow Learners” by: Dr. Lama Bendak hit of the importance of reading a passage multiple times. “One route is to give students extensive practice reading books that are at their zone of reading development”. A teacher should never give a child a book that is over their “zone of reading”. Some teachers assume that since a child is a slow reader they will pick up what they are reading about, due to the fact that they are spending quite a bit of time reading. The truth behind this, is that the students are reading slowly because they have fluency issues or they are stumbling over simple words and phrases. When a student starts stumbling all they know about comprehension fly’s out the window. The child is so determined to get words and phrases correct that they do not pay attention to what they are actually reading. Going into the teaching profession it is important to know this. The teacher should automatically pull the child aside and help catch that child up on sight words and phrases before trying to get the child to comprehend. If a child cannot read what was given to them, then they will give up. Work with the slow reader to get