RICA Competency 12: Comprehension – Concepts and Factors Affecting Reading Comprehension

Introduction

Comprehension is the reader’s understanding of what is being read. The RICA focuses on how word analysis, fluency, vocabulary, academic language and background knowledge affect comprehension, literal, inferential and evaluative comprehension, the role of sentence structure and text structures in facilitating comprehension and the role of oral language, listening comprehension, text based discussion, writing activities and independent reading in facilitating comprehension.

Examples

In my personal experience, vocabulary seems to play the biggest role in comprehension. Without understanding the words, it is nearly impossible to fully grasp the text. I have seen this multiple times in my tutoring sessions where the student can read the text but struggles with understanding its meaning. Most often, this is caused by a lack of vocabulary skills and if this can be overcome, their reading comprehension could be greatly improved. Inferential comprehension is another aspect that is crucial to a student’s comprehension. “It is the ability of a reader to interpret what she or he has read.” (pg 91) When a student can make comparisons and draw conclusions, they have achieved inferential comprehension. In my tutoring sessions today, I was able to encourage inferential comprehension by asking the questions “what was the moral of the story?” The students were able to think about what they read and process what they read in order to answer the question.   The opposite of this is literal comprehension, or understanding the surface text. (pg. 91)  Differentiation IF the student does not grasp the main point of the story THEN the teacher must first make sure they understand the vocabulary. (pg. 90) IF the student cannot interpret what they have read THEN the teacher will need to work with them and teach them how to use text clues.

IF the student can use the text to answer questions THEN they are implementing their literal comprehension skills.   

“When children are engaged in a process of generating questions and making connections throughout reading, they are involved in active comprehension.” (Learning to Read pg. 340) This supports the necessity of both literal and inferential comprehension questions to assist students in achieving true comprehension of a text.  Assessments  Students will read passages in IRI to help determine reading level.