The Cognitive Skills Essential for Reading Comprehension
Which Cognitive Skills Affect Reading Comprehension?
Reading is made of two main skills – reading the individual words and understanding the message the words convey. Successful reading comprehension requires students to be able to complete both halves of the task, which takes multiple cognitive skills.
To successfully read individual words, students need to have strong auditory processing skills. Auditory processing is what enables students to recognize letters and turn letters into words. To comprehend the words and to grasp the story or message that’s being told, students need to have strong memory skills, which helps them remember details from throughout the text. Students also need to have strong visual processing skills, which helps them picture mental images of what they’re reading.
Finally, students also need to have strong attention skills, which enables them to focus on what they’re reading, even if there are other things happening in the background.
How Weak Cognitive Skills Affect Reading Comprehension
Because reading uses multiple cognitive skills, any weak skill will affect reading comprehension. For example, students who have weak:
- Selective attention may struggle to read an entire word if there is background noise.
- Sustained attention skills may struggle to read a book from beginning to end.
- Memory may struggle remembering details from the beginning of a story.
- Auditory processing may struggle blending letters to form words.
- Visual processing may struggle picturing the events that are happening in a story.
- Processing speed may struggle to understand what they’re reading quickly.
Understanding the words
ReadRx is a program that helps students develop core reading skills, and it’s an ideal program for students who are learning to read for the first time. Although reading requires several cognitive skills, the ReadRx program puts a strong focus on auditory processing, which is the skills that helps students read and understand words. The program helps students develop skills to:
- Recognize sounds made by letters and letter combinations
- Break up unfamiliar words into smaller units of letters
- Translate units of letters into units of sound
- Combine sound bites into full words
- Turn imagined words into written and spoken language
Understanding the Underlying Message
For students who struggle to read words, comprehension can also be a challenge. Students’ brains are working so hard to decipher the individual letters and words that they don’t have brain power left to comprehend what the sentences mean, or how the sentences string together to tell a bigger story.
The ComprehendRx program through LearningRx can help change that. The program gives students the skills they need to read more deeply and confidently. The program focuses on skills such as:
- Reading speed and accuracy
- Picturing images and visualizing concepts
- Expanding vocabulary when reading and writing
- Remembering key information when reading
- Processing complex sentences and language
Get Started with LearningRx to Improve Reading Comprehension
If you’re interested in helping your student improve their reading and comprehension, contact LearningRx to get started. After an initial assessment of your student’s strengths and weaknesses, our team will put together a personalized brain training program for your student. Contact us today to get started.
