Comprehension
Evolving from simply reading to being actively engaged and understanding.
Explore the skills covered by LiteracyPlanet:
Reading comprehension is an active and interactive process that involves reading a text, processing it and understanding its meaning. The ability to comprehend text is the ultimate goal of reading, and for many students it is not a simple task. It is a more advanced and difficult component of the complex cognitive process of reading and takes time to develop.
Skills in reading comprehension distinguish passive readers from active readers. Students with good reading comprehension don’t just read, they interact with the text, and enjoy a more engaging reading experience.
Comprehension skills are also a prerequisite for acquiring content knowledge and expressing ideas and opinions through discussion and writing. They help students in all other subjects, and form an important component of functional literacy, the literacy skills required for optimal functioning in everyday life.
LiteracyPlanet’s comprehension content features hundreds of fiction and non-fiction extracts covering a range of genres and subject categories including creatures, disasters, discoveries, mysteries, people, bizarre and sport.
Each text is classified according to the most widely used reading schemas: Reading Recovery, Fountas & Pinnell, Developmental Reading Age (DRA), Rigby, Lexile and Wings, with questions that target three key comprehension skills: literal, inferential, and metacognitive, using 13 comprehension strategies:
- Main Idea
- Facts and Details
- Sequencing
- Cause and Effect
- Comparing and Contrasting
- Predicting
- Conclusions and Inferences
- Words in Context
- Fact and Opinion
- Author's Purpose
- Figurative Language
- Summarising
- Real and Make-believe
