So for some children, it may be that their
decoding is effortful, still, they are not that fluent.
So this is going to detract the amount of mental energy they have
in terms of reading comprehension
and so thinking about the bigger picture,
the higher meaning of what they're reading.
And so this isn't actually a comprehension issue per se.
In terms of actually, they understand the content of the text.
But they, once the effort of the other levels of the reading
are accomplished, there's just not enough space to do the other part,
which is the thinking about the bigger picture.
So one way to determine whether a child is struggling with comprehension
as a capacity problem, is actually quite straightforward.
You can ask the child to read a paragraph of text or
maybe a few paragraphs, depending on their ability.
And then also some comprehension questions about that text.
Some that are direct facts that they can find in those paragraphs,
and maybe a question or two that might take a bit of inference or
prediction about what might happen next.
And if they struggle with any of those, then if you then read aloud the same
text and then re-ask those questions.
If the student can clearly easily comprehend when their not actually having
to do the physical act of the reading
then it's probably more likely that it's that they're not
having reading comprehensions as a matter of oral language difficulty,
but it is more of a capacity problem, there being the effort of the decoding and
the fluency is not leaving much mental energy left for the deeper comprehension.
A key thing here is to then help the child break down the text into more
manageable chunks, so that there not guessing beyond their capacity,
so there taking a small chunk not getting beyond the point where
there comprehension is overloaded, and so it's training them
to take quite a metacognitive approach to comprehension,
monitoring their own level of understanding, and
making sure that they don't go too beyond their overload point.