What Is Reading Comprehension?
Reading comprehension is the ability to understand, interpret, and think about what you read. It is not just saying the words correctly, it is making meaning from them.
A child who can read every word on a page but cannot tell you what the passage was about has a comprehension gap. Decoding gets you the words; comprehension gets you the meaning.
What comprehension involves
Comprehension is not a single skill. It is a collection of thinking processes that work together:
- Understanding vocabulary: knowing what the words mean
- Following the text: tracking events, ideas, or arguments as they unfold
- Making inferences: reading between the lines for meaning the author implies but does not state directly
- Identifying main ideas: recognizing what a passage is mostly about
- Monitoring understanding: noticing when something does not make sense and rereading
The two building blocks
Researchers often describe comprehension with a simple formula:
Decoding + Language Comprehension = Reading Comprehension
- Decoding (phonics, fluency), turning printed words into spoken words
- Language comprehension: understanding spoken language, vocabulary, background knowledge, and reasoning
A child needs both. Strong decoders with weak vocabulary will struggle to comprehend. Children with rich oral language but poor decoding will also struggle, for a different reason.
Key comprehension strategies
Good readers use strategies like:
- Predicting: guessing what might happen next
- Questioning: asking "Why did the character do that?"
- Visualizing: forming mental pictures of the scene
- Summarizing: restating the key points in their own words
- Connecting: linking what they read to their own experience or other texts
These are skills that can be taught and practiced, they are not something a child either has or does not.
When comprehension is developing well
A child with growing comprehension can:
- Retell a story in their own words
- Answer questions about what they read
- Make predictions based on what has happened so far
- Explain why a character made a certain choice
Related concepts
- What Is an Inference in Reading?: reading between the lines
- What Is Main Idea?: finding the central point
- What Is Author's Purpose?: understanding why a text was written
- What Is Text Structure?: how organization supports understanding
- What Is Reading Fluency?: the bridge between decoding and comprehension