How do you improve a child’s comprehension?
Most people think the answer is simple: read more books or complete more comprehension exercises.
In reality, comprehension is much more complicated than that. It’s the result of several underlying skills working together. Three of the most important are reading ability, background knowledge, and vocabulary.
Reading ability is often overlooked once children become fluent readers.
As children progress from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2, most parents stop listening to them read.
It’s not unusual for older children to be a bit slapdash when reading new words – they read “sever” instead of “severe” or “conscious” instead of “conscience”. Sometimes, they skip over words altogether because they’re keen to find out what happens next.
To tackle this, listen to your child’s reading once or twice a week until they finish primary school.
While you listen, make sure your child reads accurately, makes a note of new vocabulary, and pays attention to punctuation, meaning and expression.
All of this will help their comprehension in the long run.
This is perhaps the hardest element to improve because it develops gradually over many years. Having extensive background knowledge, however, can make an enormous difference to a child’s comprehension of a passage.
One study showed that even poor readers outperform their peers in comprehension when they’re knowledgeable on the subject in the text (Recht and Leslie, 1987).
Every new experience gives children more mental “hooks” for attaching new information when they encounter it in a text.
You can do this through a variety of reading material, including non-fiction, as well as through days out and everyday conversations.
If you struggle to find the time or money for regular days out, make sure your child is knowledgeable about their immediate surroundings, including local areas, animals, plants and everyday household objects. The more your child already knows about the world, the easier it is for them to understand what they read.
Don’t overlook well-written films and TV shows as they can be great for your child’s general knowledge. My students have particularly enjoyed Anne with an E and A Series of Unfortunate Events (great for vocab).
Did you know children need to know at least 95% of the words in a passage to understand it correctly?
Some people put this figure as high as 98%.
This makes sense – if your child struggles to understand text at the word level, they’ll be lost when it comes to sentence and even paragraph-level comprehension.
The fewer words your child has to stop and work out, the more mental capacity they have available to follow the ideas, characters and plot.
Rather than learning words at random, build vocabulary systematically wherever you can. Learning common roots, prefixes and suffixes is one of the most efficient places to start, as they help children to decode the meanings of new words for themselves.
Use pictures and videos wherever possible, as these will deepen understanding as well as make words more memorable.
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If your child needs to improve their comprehension before September, I’d recommend building these habits into your weekly routine:
📕 Listen to them read aloud.
🎧 Use audiobooks to introduce more challenging books than they could comfortably read alone.
🗣️ Discuss what they’re reading and encourage them to explain ideas in their own words.
🌎 Provide rich, engaging experiences that build their background knowledge.
🧱 Spend a few minutes a day learning high-utility vocabulary and morphemes (Here’s a free list – https://link.wordier.online/summer-roots-prefixes-suffixes)
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The Wordier materials were originally designed to support my own students who struggled with the vocab side of comprehension. Every featured word has been carefully chosen because it’s likely to appear in comprehension passages, 11+ exams, and quality children’s literature.
When vocabulary feels familiar rather than intimidating, children can devote far more attention to understanding the story instead of deciphering individual words.
