Fluent But Not Yet Comprehending: What Comes Next?

Every MTSS team knows students who can decode accurately and read aloud with ease, yet whose understanding appears thin when asked what a text actually meant. Because these students’ reading is fluent, their difficulties may stay hidden until they are asked to explain what they read, make inferences, or connect ideas across a text (Snowling & Hulme, 2012).

Matching Support to the Primary Challenge

Fluent, accurate readers with comprehension difficulties may have weaknesses in vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure, or other aspects of oral language. They may also struggle to make inferences, connect ideas, or monitor whether what they’re reading makes sense (Snowling & Hulme, 2012).

One randomized controlled trial compared three approaches to supporting students ages 8-9 who had adequate decoding skills but significant comprehension difficulties. Each was delivered by trained teaching assistants three times a week for 20 weeks (Snowling & Hulme, 2012).

1. Text comprehension intervention: Students worked with written texts, applying strategies such as clarifying, summarizing, generating questions, and predicting. They also practiced metacognitive strategies and making inferences, and they learned about narrative by writing their own stories.
2. Oral language intervention: Students applied the same strategies through listening and discussion. They also received explicit vocabulary instruction and instruction in figurative language, and they learned about narratives by telling their own stories aloud.
3. Combined intervention: Students received all components of both approaches.

All three approaches produced improvements in reading comprehension compared with similar students who had not yet received intervention. Eleven months later, the gains had held, and students in the oral language intervention had pulled even further ahead. The researchers found that this continued growth was partly explained by students’ gains in vocabulary (Snowling & Hulme, 2012).

Writing About Reading: An Opportunity to Deepen Comprehension

Writing about reading is one way to help students process and deepen their understanding of text. A meta-analysis of studies in grades 2-12 found that writing about reading improved comprehension, with positive effects in nearly every study reviewed. The benefits held across narrative and informational texts and across subject areas, with notably positive effects for striving readers and writers (Graham & Hebert, 2011).

Why Might Writing Strengthen Comprehension?

Writing about a text asks students to:

• Decide which information is most important
• Organize and connect ideas into a coherent whole
• Review, critique, and build new understandings of a text’s ideas
• Engage personally with the text by making decisions about what to write
• Put ideas into their own words, which requires thinking about what those ideas mean

(Graham & Hebert, 2011)

What Does This Mean for Intervention?

Once a student has adequate decoding skills, persistent comprehension challenges may be rooted in one or more other areas. Some students benefit most from explicit vocabulary instruction and oral language development. Others need support with specific comprehension skills and strategies or with monitoring their own understanding. Many students are likely to benefit from instruction that addresses several of these areas.

Purposeful writing gives students opportunities to engage in the kind of thinking and communication that lead to deeper understanding, and discussion can help bring these threads together. When students talk through a text’s ideas and use new vocabulary before they write, they strengthen the oral language that supports comprehension while gathering and forming the ideas they will later express in writing. For students who are fluent but not yet comprehending text, comprehension instruction, oral language development, and writing represent evidence-based ways to strengthen understanding of text.