6 Essential Skills for Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension can be challenging for lots of reasons. Whatever the cause, knowing the skills involved, and which ones your child struggles with, can help you get the right support.

Here are six essential skills needed for reading comprehension, and tips on what can help kids improve this skill.

1. Decoding – This is a vital step in the reading process. Kids use this skill to sound out words they’ve heard before but haven't seen written out. The ability to do that is the foundation for other reading skills.
2. Fluency – To read fluently, Kids need to instantly recognize words, including words that can't be sounded out. Fluency speeds up the rate at which they can read and understand the text. 
3. Vocabulary – To understand what you’re reading, you need to understand most of the words in the text. Having a strong vocabulary is a key component of reading comprehension. Students can learn vocabulary through instruction. But they typically learn the meaning of words through everyday experience and also by reading.
4. Sentence construction and cohesion – Understanding how sentences are built might seem like a writing skill. So might connect ideas within and between sentences, which is called cohesion. But these skills are important for reading comprehension as well.
5. Reasoning and background knowledge – Most readers relate what they’ve read to what they know. So it’s important for kids to have a background or prior knowledge about the world when they read. They also need to be able to “read between the lines” and pull out meaning even when it’s not literally spelt out.
6. Working memory and attention – These two skills are both parts of a group of abilities known as executive function. They’re different but closely related.

Work Cited

Gillis, Margie B. “6 Reading Comprehension Skills.” Understood.org, https://www.understood.org/en/articles/6-essential-skills-needed-for-reading-comprehension. Accessed 22 November 2022.