How Language Impairment Affects Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension can be a problem area for those children diagnosed with language impairment. Since reading comprehension is made up of a group of skills, problems in certain language skill areas can affect your child’s reading comprehension. Common strategies put in place to help teach reading comprehension are not effective for those children with language impairments. If these foundational skills are not addressed, a child may continue to fall behind in school and struggle well into their teen years.

Keep in mind that trouble with reading comprehension does not mean that your child has language impairment or deficits. Some children benefit from more explicit instruction to help them understand how to break down and understand a text.

What Skills Does Reading Comprehension Require?  

Reading comprehension is made up of a number of different skills such as word reading skills, lexical development, syntactic development, and topic knowledge. Not to mention, good reading comprehension requires a good attention span and word processing.

Word reading skills involve being able to look at a word, sound it out, read it, understand the meaning and understand how it relates to the rest of the sentence. Next, lexical development is reading and understanding new words through context clues, root words, prefixes, suffixes, etc. Another important thing to understand is syntax, which involves understanding how words are combined to form meaning. If a reader can’t interpret the different parts of a sentence or understand how the placement contributes to the meaning, they will not be able to understand what they are reading. Finally, topic knowledge is another important part of understanding a text. This topic knowledge is built from the other reading that has been done. Since topic knowledge is gained through reading, those children who have trouble with reading comprehension fall further behind because they may have never been able to build a good foundation.  

Language Impairment and Reading

Language impairment can affect reading in many ways, but especially a child’s comprehension. It can be difficult to spot because a child may have a grasp of vocabulary or be able to read a text but may not be comprehending or retaining what they are reading.

A child that has trouble with reading comprehension can present as the child appearing lazy or unmotivated, or they may be struggling with their grades. To make matters worse, these children will not benefit from the typical teaching strategies, such as finding the main idea, summarizing, or answering questions about the passage, since they lack the foundational skills to be able to benefit from these strategies.

How to Help a Reader with Language Impairment

The best way to address a reader with language impairment is to make sure they are understanding the foundations of reading. It cannot be assumed that a child with language impairment is automatically acquiring the same knowledge and skills as those children without language impairment. Some of these skills have to be taught explicitly (or directly) to the child, even if their peers are acquiring these skills automatically. These could be skills such as decoding or syntactic structure. These are things that your child’s SLP should address in treatment. Your child’s SLP should be working on improving your child’s foundational skills so they are able to understand a text and participate in class activities that involve methods such as finding the main idea and summarizing key points.

Once the underlying weaknesses are being addressed, other reading comprehension strategies can begin to be implemented, such as breaking down the text structure, comprehension strategy instruction, and vocabulary and knowledge building. Breaking down text structure is a great tool to help break down difficult texts, such as those in the expository genre. Since this is a common form for educational texts, doing an activity to help break down what’s commonly expected in an expository text can be helpful.

Comprehension strategy instruction is explicit instruction in using things like graphic organizers, questions, and visual aids to help a child comprehend the text. This can be implemented once a child begins to build foundational reading skills.

Vocabulary and knowledge building help prepare a child to understand a text. Topic knowledge is built from previous reading experiences. However, it is helpful to prepare a child for a text by highlighting key vocabulary words that they may encounter or going over some basic information about a topic. This also helps to refresh the memory, and repeating information helps with comprehension.

• Sources

  Dr. Karen, “Why ‘reading comprehension’ strategies aren’t helping your students with language disorders,” Dr. Karen Speech and Language, 13 November 2017, https://drkarenspeech.com/language-processing-and-reading-comprehension/

  Nippold, Marilyn A. “Reading Comprehension Deficits in Adolescents: Addressing Underlying Language Abilities,” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 48, no. 2 (2017): 125-131, https://doi.org/10.1044/2016_LSHSS-16-0048.

  Sedita, Joan. “The Science of Reading Comprehension,” Keys to Literacy, 3 October 2021, https://keystoliteracy.com/blog/the-science-of-reading-comprehension/.