Prior skills necessary for comprehensive reading

Comprehensive reading is a crucial skill that goes beyond simple word decoding. For an individual to become a competent reader, it is essential to develop a series of previous skills that lay the foundation for a deep and meaningful understanding of texts.

In this session, we will explore the essential skills that are necessary to cultivate the capacity for comprehensive reading, from phonological skills to inferential comprehension and metacognitive awareness.

Phonological Skills

Phonological Awareness: Phonological awareness involves the ability to identify and manipulate the sounds of speech. It is made up of phoneme identification, sound segmentation and blending, and syllable manipulation. These phonological skills are crucial for recognizing written words and understanding the relationship between sounds and letters.

Vocabulary development is essential for reading comprehension. As readers acquire new words and understand their meanings, they have more resources to understand and contextualize the texts they encounter.

Word Recognition and Reading Fluency

Automatic Decoding: Automatic decoding is the ability to recognize words quickly and accurately. A competent reader can decode words effortlessly, which contributes to reading fluency and allows attention to be focused on understanding meaning. Sentence-level text comprehension involves the ability to understand the meaning of individual sentences. Readers must be able to identify subjects, verbs, objects and grammatical relationships in order to construct the meaning of linguistic structures.

Comprehension of texts at paragraph level involves understanding the relationship between ideas in a paragraph, the structure of the information and how the ideas are connected to each other. Readers must be able to identify textual structure and recognize logical relationships.

Inferential Comprehension

Contextual Inferences: Inferential comprehension goes beyond the explicit information in the text. Readers must be able to make inferences based on context, implicit information, and their own prior knowl