Reading Comprehension Programs At Home

Help for Reading Comprehension – All Ages

It’s more difficult to improve reading comprehension than you think. The current 8th-grade reading comprehension standards are challenging – namely:

1. Understand the main idea
2. Comprehend the sequence, context, and/or characters
3. Clarify parts of the text that confuse them
4. Connect the text to prior knowledge or experience
5. Make inferences and think critically about the text

And then, the ultimate end-goal reading skill—reading comprehension with metacognition: the ability to read text, understand its meaning in context, and to think critically and self-correct while reading.

Our reading comprehension software is Fast ForWord. It’s a series of 9 programs that work on these skills, step by step – from strengthening cognitive pre-reading skills (processing, working memory, attention, and sequencing), building fluency, spelling, and vocabulary, and through to thinking while reading and metacognition.

Essential Reading Comprehension Skills

Our reading comprehension program has a sequence of exercises that builds the following broader skills, considered essential to increase reading comprehension proficiency:

Familiarity with Language

Reading comprehension requires a range of language skills:

• Phonology — an ability to hear and process the sounds, the phonemes, that make up words
• Syntax – the rules that govern the structure of sentences, including grammar
• Semantics – attributing meaning to words
• Pragmatics — understanding how context impacts meaning

While most children pick up these linguistic skills by listening, struggling readers often have processing delays that limit language familiarity and dexterity. Our adaptive online exercises help improve language, which feeds directly into better reading comprehension.

Thinking While Reading (Shallow and Deep Processing)

Reading comprehension involves two levels of processing. Shallow processing is literal reading comprehension: recognizing words and sentence structure to extract basic meaning. Deep processing refers to a higher level of understanding, where the literal meaning of words connects to other words and is placed in context.

Putting words in context, drawing inferences, and thinking critically about the text require deep processing skills —the ability to think while reading. Accomplished readers do this intuitively — while reading, they constantly compare the text to their understanding of the world.

For most struggling readers, decoding takes priority, making this difficult. Like the best reading comprehension software, our exercises build the crucial skill of thinking while reading. Our programs use sentence completion and other reading puzzles that help students decode subconsciously while their minds focus on analysis.

Reading Stamina

Practice makes perfect, and so children need to be able to read for long periods. Our reading comprehension software for elementary students, teenagers, and adults develops reading stamina by:

• Making reading easier. Our programs automate decoding so it doesn’t require concentration, making reading less exhausting.
• Improving reading comprehension. Comprehending the text makes it more interesting and engaging, even enjoyable.
• Building reading speed. Our programs improve focus, reduce the need to re-read text, and build vocabulary—recognizable words—so there are fewer reasons to pause while reading. Better progress through the text makes engagement easier.

Fast ForWord also helps selective attention, which is important for reading stamina. We aim to make our students more avid readers so they keep reading and improve comprehension through practice.

We support this reading-practice habit with ClearFluency, a nonjudgmental reading software that uses speech recognition to correct and guide.

Metacognition

The final step to mastering reading is metacognition, the ability to read critically and self-correct as you go. Metacognitive reading comprehension strategies require years of practice, which can only begin once a student reads with comprehension.

If your child is struggling to get started with reading or has run into a reading comprehension wall in 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade, consider taking action. The path to the 8th-grade reading comprehension standard is long.

Start by requesting an online reading assessment for your child to see their strengths and weaknesses, including their comprehension abilities. 

APPENDIX

Improve Comprehension with Connections At Home

Making connections is an important step in improving reading comprehension. When students combine their own knowledge with information from the text to make predictions, draw conclusions, and relate to characters’ experiences and feelings, they are more likely to understand and recall what they read.

This can also help maintain interest and lead readers to seek out a particular book series or genre. This applies to confident and struggling readers.

Three Possible Connections

Three such connections are text to self, text to text, and text to world.

Movies, books, or even news stories that involve familiar situations, past and present, that we’ve gone through, read about, or know occurred in the outside world tend to resonate. We follow along attentively, and the details stay with us.

Whether fantasy, fiction, or reality, all genres contain themes, characters, and events that make these connections possible. In other words, you don’t have to live in a dystopia or have superpowers to understand loss, conflict, awkwardness, joy, heroism, or triumph.

In the classroom, teachers often model or ask students to “think aloud”, talking through reflections and questions as they arise or recording connections on Post-it notes when reading. You can do the same at home.

When predicting, focus on illustrations and the title of a chapter or book. Ask questions using the four w’s. What do you think this story will be about? Why? When and where do you think it took place?

Then prompt your child to make connections. Does this remind you of anything that’s happened to you or someone you know? Have you ever been to a place like the one on the cover? What usually happens there?

Text to Self

While students should base answers to story questions on information in the text, recognizing how the content relates to personal experience can improve understanding.

For example, a child who enjoys going to sporting events might make several realistic predictions after seeing a crowd cheering on the cover of a book titled Football Dreams.

Text to Text

Just as most TV shows and movies have common themes and plot twists, so do books. Recognizing these similarities can make even the most complicated stories easier to understand.

Text to World

Stories also resemble events in the world around us. A tale about students picking on someone can spark connections and thoughtful discussions about the impact of negative tweets and Facebook posts, or anti-bullying campaigns.

Challenge Your Child

Challenge your child to make a certain number of connections when reading or to think of stories that relate to events on a particular day. As connections are made, overall reading comprehension is improved.