Reading comprehension is a process that is built up from a range of different learning components. Founder, Sedita, J. (2015) talks about their importance surrounding comprehension and the close link that comprehension has with these different areas. She states that if a child was suffering from comprehension tasks, teachers should look if the child have problems in other areas of reading. If so, they will find it more difficult to reach their end goal of successfully mastering reading comprehension. These components include:
– Phonemic awareness
– Phonics teaching
– Fluency
– Vocabulary
Joan Sedita (2015) continues to talk about how phonemic awareness as well as phonics teaching are usually taught in the early years, so that children are familiar with words once moving through the key stages. Myers, J and Burnett, C (2004) state that phonics teaching is the reading of graphemes (letters) in a text and how they represent the phonemes (sounds). Joan states that the more practice that children have with recognising the sound of the different letters the more accurate they will be in decoding them and therefore making meaning from them. However, a research study conducted from Klinger., et al (2010) stated that there was a strong focus on literacy skills related to phonological development and decoding, but very little to increase their comprehension skills. This therefore will decrease the children’s ability to read between the lines of a text and support their reading comprehension skills. Strickland, W.D. (2013) agrees with this and believes that learners should be taught comprehension strategies by coupling surface level information from texts as well as extracting meaning from it (critical thinking).
Another important component is vocabulary. If a child is not exposed to a wide range of vocabulary once they are young, they may struggle with the process of reading comprehension. Once children have reached the age of six their vocabulary knowledge should reach a maximum of 1000 words (Caposey, T., and Heider, B. (2003). Eyres, I. (2007) comments however that children need support in developing different strategies that help them make sense of a text. He continues to talk about how written texts are a lot different than spoken ones and strategies on how to effectively engage and better understand these texts needs to be developed.
Myers, J and Burnett, C (2004) believe that DARTS activities provide children with a large variety of ideas to explore and comprehend a text. Myers and Burnett continue to talk about how the process of DARTS helps develop children’s literacy skills. These activities will not only promote literal understanding, but also encourage a child’s reading comprehension. Iser, W. (1978) supports the positive contribution that DARTS have involving the development of literacy as he believes that reading involves active engagement with texts in order to construct meaning. Myers, J and Burnett, C (2004) supports this by stating that critical reading and understanding of the text is encouraged when children can discuss and evaluate what they have read.
Baker, S.K, et al (2017) talks about the other two critical areas, which are reading each word accurately and fluently as well as comprehending the meaning of the text being read. Klinger, Vaughn and Boardman (2007) state that once children know how to decode and read words fluently it has little to no impact if the child is unable to construct meaning from the text itself. Baker, S.K., et al (2017) stated that once the fluency of reading and comprehending of reading are combined, they create the process called the ‘simple view of reading’.
