Stephanie Organ

Reading Comprehension: Issues and How to Improve Reading comprehension is the ability to understand a written message. It is an extremely important tool in today’s society, essential for understanding written instructions, emails, contracts, or any passage of text, yet many individuals struggle with it. In the United States, for example, over 40% of adults lack the basic literacy skills for most living wage jobs, according to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. But not to fear - there are many ways to combat this in order to improve your reading comprehension skills, and as with any skill, the key is practice. What you need to practice depends on which aspects you struggle with, so the following article goes through some common issues and how to overcome them. A primary obstacle to comprehension is understanding individual words. An increased vocabulary means you are more likely to be able to read a sentence and understand each word, which makes it easier to extract meaning from the sentence as a whole. Ways to increase your vocabulary include reading, or listening to podcasts, and pausing to look up words you do not understand. Alternatively there are smart phone applications available where you can play games, or learn a new word every day. But essentially, the more content you read or listen to, the better for improving your skills! Another issue is Fluency which is the ability to recognise a word without looking at each letter. When a person obtains fluency, they are able to read a sentence more quickly which can help in understanding it, especially if Memory Retention is also an issue. Repetitive word recognition exercises can help increase fluency. Such exercises can be found online, as well as in video form on YouTube. Reading aloud is also a great technique to help you recognise more words. Memory Retention, or the inability to remember all of what you have just read, can really impact reading comprehension as you can’t extract meaning from the sentence as a whole. Similarly, poor attention span can mean losing focus part way through a sentence or a text, impacting comprehension. Memory is a highly studied topic therefor there are numerous techniques available for improving it — practice and repetition are key. As for attention, there are many attention disorders which can make comprehension difficult, but it may be possible to work on your stamina, pushing up your attention span a few minutes or seconds at a time. Eventually you will be able to focus on a whole paragraph or text, making understanding it much easier. According to The Read Naturally Strategy, which is based on research-proven methods, the best techniques to use to improve overall comprehension are Teacher Modelling, Repeated Reading and Progress Monitoring. Teacher Modelling involves reading along with a well-paced proficient reader, or a recording. This helps in learning new words, pronunciation and sentence flow. Repeated Reading is re-reading the same text several times. Through this, confidence is built, accuracy increases and difficult words are mastered. It is very encouraging to hear yourself improve with each repetition, and this feeds into itself positively. Finally, Progress Monitoring is simply keeping track of your progress, excellent for motivation. In summary, it is important to identify exactly what you struggle with, then practice as much as you can to overcome this issue. Reading aloud can help with all aspects of comprehension, and practice is essential. With a little motivation and keeping track of your performance, you too can have excellent comprehension skills!