Reading and Understanding Texts
When you read a text and show you understand it by answering questions, this is called comprehension.
You use comprehension skills all the time in everyday life. For example, when you work out what a sign means, watch a film or listen to a podcast.
You often need to link together facts and clues to properly comprehend (understand) what’s happening in a text.
Here is a simple example of a comprehension question that you might find in an English lesson.
Tommy is wearing a grey jumper, round glasses and a blue hat.
Question: What colour hat is Tommy wearing?
If you can give the answer ‘Tommy is wearing a blue hat’, you have used your comprehension skills and shown you have understood the sentence correctly.
Comprehension becomes more challenging when the text is longer because you need to link together more facts and clues to understand what’s happening.
You have to be an active reader. This means you need to be thinking about what you are reading, as you are reading it.
