Reading Comprehension Issue

To complain about one's inability to comprehend and retain what one reads is to make a social and probably an economic statement. As Lerner (p. 397) says of children with reading disabilities, "poor reading leads to many other types of problems," including difficulties with educational and employment opportunities. Perhaps even more critical is the potential for being virtually cut out of the high-technology information age, which may be abundant in visual/graphic cues but which requires reading skills, whether for decoding computer-operating instructions, exploiting the content of what Lerner calls "nonprint media," or as an instrument of social integration with the competent-reader population. Special disadvantages of poor reading comprehension can be inferred from the inability to read appliance, emergency-preparedness, or medical-prescription instructions.

But realizing the social need for reading skills in general is not the same as identifying good or poor skill levels in particular. One issue in this regard, as Lerner points out (p. 416), is the importance of what the reader brings to the written material. Prior knowledge of a subject matter or of the world in general, language literacy, and general

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the reader subject is in the school system, the law requires diagnosis and analysis of learning disability and/or eligibility for special education programs by a team of specialists (Lerner, p. 70). Then instruction is designed according to "clusters of characteristics" that manifest as difficulties of learning or reading (p. 73). The importance of an interactive (i.e., oral discussion/conversation) component of comprehension assessment is suggested by Lerner's reference to the philosophy of whole language instruction as an integrated system of exploiting the linguistic experience to maximum benefit. "By becoming familiar with the sounds of language, children develop a language base for reading. Poor readers who lack an awareness of phonological sounds need specific practice with language sounds" (Lerner, p. 355). Put another way, this argues the usefulness of engaging a poor reader in conversation aimed at reaching meanings, with a view toward making an assessment of the ability to which he or she betrays phonological awareness, or an understanding of a connection between spoken words and segments of sound that build those words, in language in general, with a view toward refining and exploiting such awareness in regard to decod
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2054
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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