A child needs at least two kinds of skills before they can comprehend what they’re reading. These are oral language skills (listening, speaking and knowing how spoken words sound) and decoding skills (knowledge of letter-sound relationships to turn a written word into a spoken word).

An exception is a recent study showing that children’s listening comprehension was uniquely related to text reading fluency after accounting for list reading fluency for first graders. However, this unique relation appears to depend on children’s developmental level of word reading proficiency such that listening comprehension was uniquely related to text reading fluency only for skilled word readers but not for average word readers in first grade (Kim et al., 2011). Thus, a certain level of word reading proficiency might be needed for listening comprehension to play a role in text reading fluency. These results lend support to the verbal efficiency theory (Perfetti, 1985, Perfetti, 1992), which posits that children’s word reading proficiency influences the consolidation of fluency component skills. For readers with slow and nonautomatic word reading, word reading will constrain meaning construction processes in text reading fluency and reading comprehension. For children with skilled word reading, cognitive resources are available for meaning construction (i.e., comprehension), thereby allowing listening comprehension to be related to text reading fluency (Kim et al., 2011).

We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life

Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get.

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