Science of Reading

Word recognition and language comprehension are the two components that produce reading comprehension. Word recognition is the ability to accurately and efficiently identify printed words — connecting letters to sounds and eventually recognizing words automatically. Language comprehension is the ability to understand spoken language — vocabulary, grammar, background knowledge, and the ability to make inferences.

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Listening comprehension is the ability to make meaning from spoken language: taking in vocabulary, processing sentence structure, connecting ideas to what you already know, and drawing inferences beyond what’s stated. It matters because it becomes the strongest predictor of reading comprehension by the intermediate grades, which means a student can decode every word and still miss what the text means.

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Language comprehension is the ability to make meaning from language, whether it comes through speech or print. It includes vocabulary, background knowledge about the world, grammar and sentence structure, inference, and verbal reasoning. It matters because a student can decode every word on a page and still grasp none of it, and no amount of phonics instruction reaches a gap on this side of the reading equation.

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The simple view of reading formula is D × LC = R: decoding multiplied by language comprehension equals reading comprehension. It tells you whether a struggling reader’s breakdown is in sounding out the words or in understanding the language they carry, the difference between the right intervention and months of the wrong one. Gough and Tunmer proposed it in 1986.

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