Overlooked Complexities in Language

Identifying the Difficult Parts of Simple Sentences

Transcript

Reading comprehension is quite complex and reading comprehension can break down right at the sentence level before you even get into the paragraph level. So if I have a sentence that says "Sara ran to school with her friends." It's pretty simple, right? And everybody takes that for granted because actually to understand that sentence it's not simple at all. Children need to be able to decode first so they need to be able to read each word. And unless they're taught to decode explicitly, they will struggle trying to figure out what each of the words in the sentence mean.

Once they are able to decode the word Sara spelled S-A-R-A  so /s/a/r/a/, /s/a/r/a/  they actually need to have the vocabulary behind it, the meaning that comes down. We know that Sara is the name of a girl. "Sara ran." The next word is ran. Vocabulary, understanding allows us to understand that it is an action. "To school with her friends." "To school": we need to understand it's where we're going to with whom. So even at the level of a sentence understanding that we have a who, what's happening, with whom and where and then synthesizing that information together is quite complex.

Summary

A speech language pathologist breaks down the complex parts of a seemingly simple sentence and identifies the skills that a child needs to read and comprehend it.