The child reads well, but does not understand what he read: when decoding is not understanding

The child picks up the book and starts reading. Don't change letters. Don't spell. Pronounce the words correctly. Reasonably respects punctuation and finishes the paragraph without appearing to be too difficult.

The adult then asks: “What do you understand?”

Silence. After a few seconds: “I don’t know.”

The adult is surprised: “But you just read it!”

And it is precisely here that a fundamental distinction appears for us to understand learning to read: Pronouncing correctly what is written does not necessarily mean understanding what was read. This difference can go unnoticed for a long time, because a child's oral reading conveys an impression of competence that does not always correspond to their understanding of the text.

Reading words is just part of reading

When a child looks at the word “dog”, recognizes its letters, relates graphemes and sounds and is able to pronounce it, an essential process called decoding occurs. During the early years of literacy, this achievement is enormous (as we discussed in our article on changing letters in writing and psychopedagogical assessment).

But now imagine the sentence: “When he realized the gate was open, Lucas ran into the street and called desperately for his dog.”

Decoding allows you to pronounce all these words. Understanding requires much more. The child needs to realize that the dog probably came out of the gate, that Lucas is worried, that there is a causal relationship between the open gate and his attitude and that the word “desperately” provides information about the character's emotional state.

None of this is completely written in a single sentence. The reader needs to construct meaning.

One of the best-known models in the scientific study of reading, called Simple View of Reading, precisely proposes that reading comprehension depends on the interaction between two major components: decoding and language understanding. A child can, therefore, adequately develop word reading and present important weaknesses in the second component (COLE et al., 2023). This is where we find some children who seem to “read very well” but understand little.

Reading can sound fluent and still remain superficial

There is an important difference between apparent fluency and comprehension. Some children automate word recognition relatively well. This allows them to read orally with enough speed to produce a read that is pleasing to the ears.

However, while the eyes move through the lines, the brain needs to perform another task simultaneously: building a coherent mental representation of what is being read. The reader needs to connect the current sentence to the previous one, keep characters and events in mind, recognize cause and consequence relationships, interpret words in context, update their understanding when new information appears, and separate details from the central idea. It's almost like putting together a story while it's still coming.

Scientific research has already described children with fluent and accurate word reading, but with significant comprehension and oral language difficulties (NATION et al., 2004). Therefore, the question should not just be “can she read?”, but rather: “What happens to the information after she reads it?”

Vocabulary can be a hidden piece of the problem

Imagine that a child reads correctly: “The boy remained reluctant to the proposal.”

She can pronounce the word “reluctant” perfectly. But if you don't know its meaning, an important part of the message will be lost. Now imagine this happening not with one word, but with five, ten or fifteen expressions throughout a text. Reading continues, but comprehension begins to crumble.

Vocabulary and linguistic knowledge have a direct relationship with understanding texts. Research with children who have specific comprehension difficulties often finds weaknesses in components of oral language, including vocabulary, listening comprehension and semantic and syntactic knowledge (SPENCER; WAGNER, 2018).

That's why expanding vocabulary doesn't simply mean handing over a list of words to memorize. It means talking, explaining words in context, comparing meanings, using synonyms, exploring stories and allowing the child to encounter words several times and in different situations.

Understanding also requires reading what is not written

Perhaps one of the most interesting skills involved in reading is inference. Consider:

"Marina came into the house completely wet. She left her umbrella open near the door."

The text does not say: “It was raining”. Yet you concluded this immediately because you made an inference. A competent reader combines the information provided by the text with what they already know about the world and produces a conclusion that was not explicitly presented.

Some children are able to locate what the text says directly with relative ease (e.g.: “What was the girl’s name? Marina”). However, they find it much more difficult when we ask: “What was the weather probably like?” or “Why did she leave her umbrella open?”. Here we find a crucial difference between locating information and understanding interpersonal and causal relationships.

Prior knowledge changes what we can understand

No text reaches a completely empty mind. As we read, we use previously accumulated knowledge to interpret new information. A short text about a football match will probably be easier for a child who knows expressions such as corner, offside, extra time and penalty area.

Likewise, a text about evaporation, ecosystems, migration or elections requires some conceptual knowledge to be understood in depth. Therefore, two children with similar decoding abilities can understand the same text very differently.

Reading comprehension involves an active reader, their goals and their previous experiences. Teaching content also helps teach reading: the larger and more organized the child's repertoire of knowledge, the greater the number of possible connections when faced with new information.

“She answered all the questions” does not always mean she understood

There is a very common trap here. After the text, traditional questions appear: "What was the character's name? Where did he live? What object did he find?". The child returns to the text, looks for the corresponding word and copies the answer. You get all three right, but perhaps you understood very little of the narrative.

An activity may only assess the ability to locate explicit information, even though it appears to be assessing reading comprehension. Therefore, it is important to include questions that require relationships, justifications, inferences and reconstruction of the message. A much more revealing question might be: “Tell this story to me your way.” Suddenly, information appears that a multiple-choice quiz would never show.

A small observation test can provide valuable clues

There is a simple comparison that parents and teachers can make:

1. Choose a short, age-appropriate text. First, let the child read it alone and then ask him to explain what he understood.
2. At another time, read a text of similar difficulty to her yourself, allowing her to just listen and ask questions about the story.

If the child understands much better when listening than when reading, this suggests that the demands of decoding and reading writing may be consuming excessive cognitive resources. If they demonstrate similar difficulty both reading and listening, it becomes especially relevant to observe broader aspects of language comprehension, vocabulary and narrative organization. In our study on what the child's behavior is trying to communicate, we highlight the importance of observing subtle signs of school frustration.

What can we observe at school and at home?

Some behaviors indicate that it is worth investigating reading comprehension more carefully:

• Reads correctly, but cannot explain the text in their own words;
• Remembers isolated fragments, but cannot organize the events;
• Understands explicit information, but has marked difficulty with inferences;
• Does not easily identify the main idea of ​​the text;
• Loses cause and consequence relationships between facts;
• You know the word when you pronounce it, but you don't know how to explain its meaning;
• Responds much better when the content is presented orally;
• Need to return to the text repeatedly without realizing where the meaning was lost.

It is also essential to differentiate this avoidance from other executive difficulties. As we explained in the article about when the child knows what to do but can't start, planning disorganization differs from avoidance due to lack of understanding of the text.

We shouldn’t turn every difficulty in understanding into dyslexia

This distinction deserves to be highlighted. In dyslexia, core difficulties are found particularly in accurate or fluent word recognition, decoding and skills related to phonological processing. Difficulties in understanding may appear secondarily, including because laborious reading reduces the reading experience (CASTLES; RASTLE; NATION, 2018).

But there is another profile: the child who decodes adequately and, even so, understands less than expected. An extensive meta-analysis found particularly important difficulties in oral language skills for this group (SPENCER; WAGNER, 2018). Therefore, when faced with the complaint “he reads but doesn’t understand”, automatically starting to look for dyslexia can lead us in the wrong direction.

How to help a child better understand what they read?

A good intervention is not just about increasing the amount of reading. It is possible to teach explicit comprehension strategies:

• Before reading: Explore the title, activate prior knowledge and anticipate the topic (“What do you already know about this?”).
• While reading: Pause to check the meaning (“What happened so far?”, “Why did the character do this?”, “Does this part match what you thought before?”).
• After reading: Ask for the retelling in your own words (“What is the most important idea?”, “What did the text not say directly, but we can conclude?”).

The psychopedagogical perspective

When faced with a child who reads correctly but understands little, the psychopedagogical assessment observes the accuracy and fluency of reading, vocabulary, oral language, the ability to retell stories and the production of inferences. As we reinforce in the article Diagnosis is not a guess: the importance of careful psycho-pedagogical assessment, the goal is not simply to label the child, but to discover at what point in processing meaning begins to be lost.

Conclusion

A child can pronounce all the words on a page and finish reading without having constructed a coherent representation of what they read. Reading does not end when we pronounce the last word; it ends when we manage to construct meaning, establish relationships and incorporate the new message into our prior knowledge.

Therefore, when faced with a child who reads a whole page and says “I don’t know what I read”, the most important question is not “Why didn’t you pay attention?”, but yes: “Let’s find out together where the text stopped making sense to you?”. This attitude changes everything.

References

CASTLES, Anne; RASTLE, Kathleen; NATION, Kate. Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, v. 19, no. 1, p. 5–51, 2018. DOI: 10.1177/1529100618772271.

COLE, Alissa M. et al. Evaluating the Simple View of Reading for Children With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Journal of Educational Psychology, v. 115, no. 5, p. 700–714, 2023. DOI: 10.1037/edu0000806.

NATION, Kate et al. Hidden Language Impairments in Children: Parallels Between Poor Reading Comprehension and Specific Language Impairment? Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, v. 47, p. 199–211, 2004. DOI: 10.1044/1092-4388(2004/017).

SPENCER, Mercedes; WAGNER, Richard K. The Comprehension Problems of Children With Poor Reading Comprehension Despite Adequate Decoding: A Meta-Analysis. Review of Educational Research, v. 88, no. 3, p. 366–400, 2018. DOI: 10.3102/0034654317749187.