The development of reading skills for each child is a very important journey.

For a lot of us, reading is a skill learned by a child either by mastering the letters of the alphabet and then committing the words on the page to memory using daily drilling methods and memorization. Or, we use the phonics route where the child learns the sound-letter combinations and then decodes and encodes words through that knowledge.

This is not a write-up about which one works and which doesn’t, nor is it about which one is right or wrong.

Rather, I would like us to take a step back and consider what other skills may be needed for the child to soar and become a fluent and intelligent reader who can understand what is written on the page.

After all the goal of reading is to be able to understand, and comprehend what is written.

Communication is key.

The skills described above, using memorisation of words or decoding through sound-letter knowledge are relevant to word recognition.

Let me ask, are these the only skills needed for reading?

Certainly not.

It is important to note that children who have been drilled or taught to recognize words even if it’s by decoding, are mainly mechanical readers.

This means they can read what is on the page but may not be able to understand what they have been reading.

When this happens we have turned the child into an illiterate!

Why? How?

The simple fact is, the child can read but the goal of communication has not happened! They do not understand what they have read.

This is really bad news, is it not?

Most may be able to read the words on a page perfectly well, but in order to understand what they are reading so much more work is needed to be done in language comprehension skills.

Briefly here are a few language comprehension skills children need.

1. Vocabulary building
2. ⁠ A huge background knowledge of different topics and subjects.
3. ⁠Language structure including grammar and syntax.
4. L⁠iteracy knowledge such as print concepts, genre types etc.
5. ⁠Verbal reasoning so that inferences and predictions can be made and understood.

In the next post, we will look at these language comprehension skills in a more detailed way.