Reading comprehension is the ability to understand what you’ve read, rather than just say the words out loud. For your child, those are two separate skills, and they can be good at one while still working on the other.
Knowing how the whole thing fits together is what tells you where your child is stuck. At Bjorem Literacy, we design tools for children who are still putting reading together, and working out which piece is missing is always where we start.
What Reading Comprehension Is
Reading comprehension is everything that happens after your child gets the words off the page. They have to work out what each word means, follow how the words fit together into a sentence, and connect it to what’s already happened in the story. It’s a lot of work for one small brain, and most of it is invisible to you.
It helps to separate it from decoding (translating printed letters into sounds, then into spoken words), because even though decoding is necessary for comprehension, it’s actually a separate skill (Lervåg, Hulme, & Melby-Lervåg, 2018; Melby-Lervåg, Lyster, & Hulme, 2012). Your child decodes “lighthouse” by matching the letters to their sounds. Whether they know what a lighthouse is, and why it’s there in this story, is comprehension.
What Reading Comprehension Looks Like in a Child
You’ll hear it before you see it. A child who’s understanding what they read will ask you questions about the story, groan when something bad happens to a character they like, and tell you what happened at dinner without being asked twice. They’ll also notice when something doesn’t add up, which is the sign most parents miss.
Older children show it in different ways. They’ll spot that a character is lying before the story says so, or work out why someone did something the author never explains. Filling in what isn’t written down is a large part of comprehension, and children who do it well understand more of what they read (Cain & Oakhill, 1999; Cain, Barnes, Bryant, & Oakhill, 2001).
The Skills Reading Comprehension Depends On
Comprehension is what happens when several other skills come together, and a wobble in any one of them shows up as a child who doesn’t understand what they’ve read.
| Skill | What it means | What it looks like when it’s missing |
|---|---|---|
| Vocabulary | Knowing what the words mean | Your child reads “lighthouse” perfectly and has no idea what one is |
| Listening comprehension | Understanding a story told out loud | Your child doesn’t follow a story you read to them either |
| Background knowledge | Knowing enough about the world to picture what’s described | A story set in a hospital or at sea leaves your child lost |
| Word reading | Getting through the words without it costing all your effort | Your child sounds out every word and forgets the start of the sentence by the end |
| Inference making | Filling in what the author doesn’t say outright | Your child can tell you what happened but not why |
| Sentence structure | Following how a sentence fits together, not just the words in it | A long or tangled sentence loses your child even when they know every word |
Vocabulary is the one most parents think of first. Children who know more word meanings tend to understand more of what they read, and much of that advantage works through their ability to fill in what the text leaves out (Daugaard, Cain, & Elbro, 2017).
You can grow background knowledge by visiting places, watching things together, and explaining whatever comes up, so your child has something to picture when they encounter it in a book.
Listening comprehension develops before the reading kind, and how well a child understands spoken stories predicts how well they’ll understand written ones later (Lervåg et al., 2018).
Word reading is the one you can work on most directly. How well your child hears the individual sounds inside words is closely tied to how well they read words on a page (Melby-Lervåg et al., 2012). If sounding out is slow and effortful, you can practice those sounds together with phonics books.
Why an Easy Book Can Still Be Hard to Understand
When we call a book difficult, we usually mean the reading itself is difficult. The words are tricky to sound out, and the sentences run long and tangled. That kind of book is hard in the way you’d expect.
The second kind is a little less obvious. A book can use short, easy words and still leave your child lost if they don’t know much about the subject (Recht & Leslie, 1988). A chapter about volcanoes might be perfectly readable for your child, but if they’ve never come across one before, they could reach the end without understanding what a volcano is or why it erupts. The reading was easy, and the subject was not.
So when your child doesn’t understand something, work out which of the two is in the way. Ask them to tell you what the hard words meant. If they can, the words weren’t the problem, and what they need is a chat about the subject before they read rather than more reading practice.
How Reading Comprehension Develops
Reading comprehension starts long before your child can read a word. When you read to a toddler and they point at the dog, they’re already developing comprehension, just without the decoding on top. At three, most children can say what’s happening in a picture, and by four they can tell you what comes next in a story they know well.
By five, most children can answer simple questions about a story after you read it to them, and tell back a story with at least two things happening in it. Comprehension at that age runs through listening, since your child can’t yet read enough words to get much from the page themselves. That makes talking about books you read aloud the main way to grow reading comprehension in kindergarten.
By the end of third grade, your child should be using clues from a story to work out what it means, predicting what happens next, asking and answering questions about what they’ve read, and drawing on what they already know to make sense of a new topic.
By the end of fifth grade, they decide which information is important, describe how a character and a plot develop across a whole book, and notice the choices an author made.
Children move through this at very different rates. Being ahead or behind at any one point isn’t a concern on its own, but a gap that stays put over months is one to raise with a speech-language pathologist.
Reading with your child daily is one of the simplest ways to improve their reading comprehension. Children who read more, and who are read to more, tend to understand more of what they read (Mol & Bus, 2011). Mix in books on different topics, since books put a wider range of words in front of your child than everyday conversation does.
When Reading Comprehension Isn’t Developing
A few signs a child is struggling with reading tend to show up together. Your child reads a page well and can’t tell you anything about it afterwards, more often than not. They read with no sense of where the sentence is going. They don’t follow a story you read to them either (Lervåg et al., 2018). Or they’ve been reading daily for months, and you can’t see any change.
Seeing one of those on a tired evening doesn't necessarily mean anything. It’s a pattern over weeks that tells you something. And knowing where the trouble sits, like with vocabulary or word reading, can tell you where to focus your support. If word reading is the issue, dyslexia reading tools can help.
If your child continues to struggle, don’t be afraid to book an evaluation with a speech-language pathologist. They can test the spoken language skills that sit underneath reading and point you toward the right tools and support. So don’t wait - evaluate.
Frequently asked questions
Should I correct every mistake when my child reads to me?
Not every time. Correct some sessions and let your child read uninterrupted in others. Both help, and a child who gets stopped on every word tends to lose interest in reading to you at all.
My child’s teacher says their comprehension is fine, but I don’t see it at home. Who’s right?
You could both be right. School reading tends to be short passages with questions afterwards, which is a different task from following a whole chapter book alone. Ask the teacher what they’re basing it on, and tell them what you’re seeing at home.
Is there a point where I should stop reading aloud to my child?
There’s no age to stop. Children get a lot from being read to long after they can read themselves, because you can take on books that are still too hard for them to manage alone. Plenty of families carry on well into the school years.
Does my child need to read every day?
Daily is better than a long session at the weekend, because little and often is how the habit sticks. Aim for fifteen to twenty minutes twice a day. If you can’t, ten minutes total still counts on a busy day.
Sources:
- Cain, K., Barnes, M. A., Bryant, P. E., & Oakhill, J. V. (2001). Comprehension skill, inference making ability, and their relation to knowledge. Memory and Cognition, 29(6), 850 to 859. https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/3558/
- Cain, K., & Oakhill, J. (1999). Inference making ability and its relation to comprehension failure in young children. Reading and Writing, 11(5), 489 to 503. https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/72210
- Daugaard, H. T., Cain, K., & Elbro, C. (2017). From words to text: Inference making mediates the role of vocabulary in children’s reading comprehension. Reading and Writing, 30(8), 1773 to 1788. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-017-9752-2
- Lervåg, A., Hulme, C., & Melby-Lervåg, M. (2018). Unpicking the developmental relationship between oral language skills and reading comprehension: It’s simple, but complex. Child Development, 89(5), 1821 to 1838. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12861
- Melby-Lervåg, M., Lyster, S. H., & Hulme, C. (2012). Phonological skills and their role in learning to read: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 138(2), 322 to 352. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026744
- Mol, S. E., & Bus, A. G. (2011). To read or not to read: A meta-analysis of print exposure from infancy to early adulthood. Psychological Bulletin, 137(2), 267 to 296. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021890
- Recht, D. R., & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers’ memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16 to 20. https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-0663.80.1.16
