Improving Reading Comprehension - Understanding Elementary Reading

If you are like most people, you want to do more than simply read a text You want to improve your comprehension. In this article, I will explain in detail the first level of reading comprehension as defined by Mortimer Adler in his ground breaking book, "How To Read A Book." This first level of reading is aptly titled, "Elementary Reading."

Elementary reading applies to the earliest stages of learning how to read. It consists of several different elements. First, you need to learn the alphabet. This typically is taught between the first and second year of elementary school. During this phase, the emphasis is often placed upon learning to identify letters. Students often are given templates where they trace the silhouettes of letters as they learn how to draw them using a pencil. Some students find this challenging. After all some letters look almost identical. Take the lower case print form of the letter "b" and the letter "d". Both letters are formed using a straight line, and a loop at the bottom. In fact, the only difference is the direction of the loop. When you consider how many students are dyslexics whose brains twist letters around, it is easy to see how this problem could occur.

Remember when you were taught that the letter "A" sounds like the sound Aaah in some words, but can also sound like the letter "A." Learning letter sound combinations are another form of elementary reading. This often confuses the reading neophyte. The confusion often occurs because many letters have many different sounds attached to them. It can be confusing learning the rules that determine which sound to use for the same letter under different circumstances.

Next students learn how to combine certain letters to create more sophisticated sounds called diphthongs. A diphthong is a sound created by a combination of several letters. A good example is the sound of chuuu in the word "Chanukah." This hard and guttural sound can not be produced using a single letter in the English language, but simulates a common sound found in the Hebrew language.

Students learning elementary reading usually do not have good comprehension. They are simply learning how to translate letter symbols into words. Comprehension truly begins with the next level of reading. It is called, "Inspectional Reading,"