How do We Understand What We Understand?
It took reading specialists many years to realize that understanding what you read and reading itself require two different processes. There are children who can read but cannot understand, and there are children who cannot read well because of some problem with speech but who, nevertheless, can understand through silent reading.
Reading involves decoding words and identifying the sound that must accompany the printed word. Reading as word decoding is used in the translation of spelling to speech. So, do the two aspects of reading require some abilities that are common? Does understanding what we read involve some abilities similar to those required when reading words?
What is Involved in Comprehension?
One of the first things to understand is the difference between reading comprehension and listening comprehension. The processes for the two are essentially the same, but the manner in which we get the input is different. Obviously, the child does not need to read if we want him/her to understand oral presentations.
The child does not have to decode words or bother learning the phonological characteristics of printed words if he/she is listening to speech. Thus, many children who have comprehension problems can be helped if we record what is written in a passage or a story on a tape recorder and play it back to them. If they have no difficulty in comprehension after listening to the tape recording, then they really do not have a problem in comprehension.
It is also clear that if some children have a great difficulty in reading—reading slowly or with hesitation—then their comprehension is threatened because a great deal of resources or capacity is taken up by the activity of reading itself. Therefore, children who are slow readers and who read each word with difficulty may be wrongly diagnosed as having comprehension difficulties. Clearly, we should give all children who are experiencing comprehension problems, both listening and reading comprehension tasks.
Having said that, we must consider that in presenting oral speech, the child (or even the adult) has a different problem in comprehension, compared to the presentation of the material in written form. In the oral form, the individual cannot go back to what he/she has heard unless it is a mechanical presentation through a tape recorder. To understand, a listener will require intellectual processes such as attention, specifically attention to the sequence of speech.
For example, if a speaker is presenting a long sentence such as The house that Jack built was burned by an arsonist named Jim, and the listener is asked who burned the house, attention must be paid to the sequence in which the words occur. This is similar to reading comprehension in that the reader is required to pay attention to and analyze the sequence of the words in a sentence. The difference is that the reader can go back and read the sentence over and over again until the meaning becomes clear, whereas in the case of a listener this is not possible.
Another point that becomes clear with regard to comprehension is syntax. Material that is presented verbally is usually adjusted to the listener’s limited capacity for processing very long sentences. A good speaker is naturally aware of the listener’s needs and adjusts the structure of sentences and paragraphs accordingly. However, in written material, the writer has some freedom to use relatively complex syntax than a speaker might use, while remaining aware of the reader’s needs with regard to putting things in context and giving the reader cues to anticipate how the paragraph or the discourse is going to end.