Jj is for Jottings 67.  Reading Comprehension – Is Your Child Barking at Print?

When your child is reading to you, are you sure they (I’m using “they” to cover both boys and girls) are actually understanding what they are reading, or are they just barking at print? i.e. Reading the words correctly but not actually decoding them, so they really have no idea what they are reading.  It is very easy to be fooled into thinking your child is a good reader – which, in a mechanical sense, they are – but since the purpose of reading is to understand the message in the text, if they are not understanding the text they are not reading successfully.  In this sense there are 2 overall aspects to reading – the mechanics (knowing sound-letter links and being able to sound out words, recognise words by sight etc.), and decoding (understanding/comprehending the text).

There are 4 possible variations of these 2 aspects of reading:

• Good mechanics plus good comprehension= a good reader.
• Good mechanics plus poor comprehension=the barkers.
• Poor mechanics plus poor comprehension=reading is a struggle.
• Poor mechanics plus good comprehension=less likely, because if you are struggling to work out what the words are, you are less likely to get enough fluency and flow to be able to understand the message. Each word tends to be treated as an individual entity.

I have met some bright autistic children who can “read” at 3 years of age (one was able to bark at newspaper articles, but that’s all it was – barking, not reading.  Nothing more useful than a good party trick, really.)  The other main group of children who bark at print are those who have poor receptive language skills (with or without poor expressive language skills), but who are lucky enough not to be struggling with the mechanics of reading.   These children can be very successful with reading aloud (if you don’t check their comprehension) and with spelling, and it can be quite some time before anyone twigs to the fact that they are not understanding what they are reading.

This is one very good reason why, when hearing your child read, don’t just listen to the child read the book through and tick that off the list of things you had to do today, but ask questions about the story to check that they have understood what they have just read.

It is also a good argument for reading with children rather than reading to them, so that you are encouraging active listening and comprehension when you are the one doing the reading.