If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me for some good “comprehension” and “inferencing” techniques for kids with language disorders, I could retire and buy a private island.
If I had another dollar for every article I saw on Pinterest about “reading comprehension”, “main idea”, “inferencing” for language therapy I could probably upgrade and buy a dozen private islands.
And it makes sense. Poor language processing and reading comprehension are the primary symptoms we see in kids with language disorders who end up on our caseloads.
And of course seeing as how the complaints are often that they “can’t follow directions”, and can’t state the main idea or draw inferences from texts, logic may tell us that our therapy time should be spent working on those skills.
But here’s the problem with that. A lot of those kids aren’t responding to therapy. They didn’t respond to the classroom instruction focused on “comprehension strategies” either, which is why they’re on your caseload.
Chances are they aren’t “responding” to the comprehension strategies that you’re sending home for homework either…and now the parents are getting frustrated because they’re kids don’t want to do the work (which lets face it…was probably the case before…but now it’s gotten worse).
The “logic” of working on reading comprehension strategies for students with language disorders is actually not logical at all.
You’ve simply taken what WASN’T working before and multiplied it.
So now you’re doing more of what wasn’t working.
It’s no big surprise that it STILL isn’t working, except now your student’s frustration level has amplified because you’re repeatedly asking them to do something they don’t know how to do.
The problem here is NOT that working on reading comprehension is a bad thing.
Sometimes its exactly what certain students need; even students who’ve had a history of language issues.
The problem is that many students might not even be ready to work on those higher-level comprehension skills because they have no foundation.
Think of it like this.
Let’s say you’re teaching someone how to swim. Would you just throw them in the deep end and tell them to swim to the other end?
Probably not; unless you want an accidental death and a lawsuit.
What you’d likely do is teach them HOW to swim first.
Practice some of the foundational skills that collectively constitute “swimming”.
Show them what to do with their arms, legs, and body position. Give them some explicit, direct, strategic instruction.
Once they have that foundation, only then can you put them in the deep end and have them practice swimming, because then they actually know what to do when you tell them to “swim to the other end.”
Reading comprehension skills like “stating the main idea” or “drawing inferences” are kind of like swimming in the deep end.
There are a lot of discrete skills being applied all at once.
If just one of them is out of place, the whole thing falls apart.
If students are lacking multiple skills, yet you keep asking them to “state the main idea”, you may be throwing them in the deep end and telling them to “swim to the other side” without actually showing them how to do it.
This is why so many of our students who are working on reading comprehension aren’t making progress. We’re repeatedly asking them to “practice” something they don’t have any idea how to do.
Scott (2009), explained in the article “A case for the sentence in reading comprehension” that reading comprehension is not just a single skill.
Instead, it’s a set of skills we use all at the same time. And when our students aren’t able to put it all together we’re not doing them any favors by skimming over the pieces involved and letting them drown.
According to Scott (2009) the cause of general comprehension problems is often tied to underlying semantic and syntactic difficulties.
In other words, if students don’t understand the sentences, they aren’t likely to understand the main idea of an entire paragraph.
If we don’t address underlying deficits in lexical and syntactic knowledge, students may not be capable of benefiting from general comprehension strategies focused on main idea and supporting details (Gillon & Dodd, 1995; Nippold, 2017).
But “reading comprehension” is relevant to the curriculum. Is my therapy “aligned” if I’m not working on it?
A lot of interventions for students with “processing” and “comprehension” difficulties skim over the root causes (e.g, weak sentence comprehension) and head right towards treating the symptoms (e.g., retelling the main idea and supporting details).
And while this might make us feel good because we’re working on the thing our students can’t do, it’s actually backwards.
We need to understand the meaning of a sentence in order to get meaning from the text as a whole.
If we don’t have syntactic and semantic knowledge of the text, our cognitive resources are spent trying to process both the words and sentences.
Which means we have no resources left to actually think about the “big picture” of what we’re reading.
In other words, there’s no way you’re going to get the “gist” or the “main idea” of the entire thing if you can’t understand the individual words or sentences.
The only way to improve the “big picture” is to back up and fix the individual parts that aren’t working properly.
Many times, fixing those parts will make the “whole” finally work.
That means if you’re working on one of the discrete skills that are causing your students to struggle in the first place, you actually ARE working on comprehension.
And that means you’re “aligned” with the curriculum, because that intervention can actually improve your students’ comprehension skills and ability to access the curriculum.
But the teachers/my boss/my administrator/my students’ parents WANT me to focus on “comprehension” and the other things kids are doing in class. Shouldn’t I do it?
Again, no. You don’t have to listen to them.
You can of course be professional about it, but you don’t have to blindly follow what other people are asking you to do, especially when they don’t have the background and training that you do.
You’re the expert who knows that they’ll never be able to DO any of those things I just mentioned if you don’t give your students a foundation first.
And you are “working on comprehension” when you work on the skills causing the problems in the first place, like syntactic and lexical knowledge.
You’re also advocating for your students, because we know based on the research that if we don’t address those underlying skills, the comprehension problems are going to persist (Nippold, 2017).
This of course, doesn’t mean you’ll NEVER directly work on some of those higher-level comprehension skills. It just means you’ll do it when the time is right.
Trust me all those people I’ve mentioned above (teachers/administrators/parents/students) will thank you when they see the results.
But here’s the next challenge:
How do we actually get those groundbreaking results, where our students are actually comprehending what they’re reading and excited to come to school?
And their teachers and parents are praising us and recommending us to their friends and colleagues? ‘
How do we know what language skills are actually causing those comprehension problems, and how can we possibly address all of that in the little time we have with them?
This is exactly what I show my students how to do in my course that shows SLPs a framework for language therapy, Language Therapy Advance.
Quite frequently, I’ll have SLPs come in to the program with a handful of challenges:
“I can’t get to all of these language goals in just 30 minutes a week!”
“I’m jumping around all over the place with these goals and my students aren’t making progress on any of them!”
“I’ve been working on reading comprehension and “wh” questions for ages and I’m still not seeing progress.”
They want to figure out how to get to it all.
But as they learn when they go through Language Therapy Advance, they don’t actually have to keep trying to “get to it all”, they just need to get to the skills that make the biggest impact.
This is exactly what we want to do when we “counterbalance”: Focus on one thing at a time.
When they work on a skill, they usually are integrating multiple language skills at a time, but there’s usually ONE key focus of the that’s the highest priority in that session, and in a given treatment cycle.
That “one thing” stays the main thing until it’s time to move on to the next area of focus.
This allows them to address the language skills their students need with enough depth that their students get it, rather than jumping around from skill to skill.
FEWER skills. More INTENSITY on those skills.
This results in:
Less time spent planning. Fewer materials to gather. Less stress. Easier data collection.
And most importantly, better treatment outcomes for students who struggle to comprehend language.
For a more detailed breakdown and some examples of key syntactic structures that develop in the school-age years, be sure to check out this free guide.
This free guide is called The Ultimate Guide to Sentence Structure.
Inside you’ll learn exactly how to focus your language therapy. Including:
- The hidden culprit behind unexplained “processing problems” that’s often overlooked.
- The deceptively simple way to write language goals; so you’re not spending hours on paperwork (goal bank included).
- The 4 sentence types often behind comprehension and expression issues and why they’re so difficult.
- An easy-to-implement “low-prep” strategy proven to boost sentence structure, comprehension, and written language (conjunctions flashcards included).
References:
Scott, C. M. (2009). A case for the sentence in reading comprehension. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 40, 184-191. doi: 10.1044/0161-1461(2008/08-0042)
