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THE SCIENCE OF READING & LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION

Language Structures & Verbal Reasoning

When I was a teenager, I went through a big mystery phase and probably read every Teen Power Inc., and Nancy Drew book I could get my hands on. My Mum has always been a big fan of Agatha Christie novels and so on one car trip, we played the alphabet game: 

A is for axe, B is for bludgeon, C is for confining 

Can you guess our categories? Yes, for each letter of the alphabet we had to come up with a way a person might be murdered in a mystery novel. To be fair - it is a long drive from Mildura to Melbourne!

What I didn’t realise at the time, is that all the word games I used to play with my family were actually building my Language Structures and my Verbal Reasoning Skills. Language Structures are made up of our semantics - word choice and word meaning, and syntax - the grammatical rules of language. When we read each sentence, we need to understand the meaning of each word and how each word relates to all the other parts of the sentence. Only then can we connect sentences and understand the text as whole. As Nancy Hennessy states, understanding sentences is important because ‘The sentence lies at the heart of communicating thought and meaning, whether you are the writer or the reader.’ 

Written language in texts differ from spoken language, by being generally more formal and more complex. Consider these sentences: 

• The dog padded down the street. 
• Swiftly, the brown dog padded down the dark street under the moonlit sky. 
• Swiftly, the brown dog, who had been white only this morning, padded down the dark street under the moonlit sky. 

The first and second sentence has a straightforward noun and verb, quite close to each other, allowing us to easily understand the who (the dog) and the do (padded down the street.) The second sentence is slightly more complex as we need to add the additional details to deepen our understanding. But in our final sentence, the noun and verb are now separated by a dependent clause and as readers we must connect the who and the do and comprehend the additional information. 

Our second section of the reading rope is Verbal Reasoning, which is the ability to understand the explicit and implicit meaning of a text. Readers must integrate ideas within and across texts by interpreting abstract language, making inferences, and understanding metaphors, concepts and figurative language. 

Looking at the sentences above readers can use words like ‘swiftly’ and ‘moonlit sky’ to infer the time and reasons why the dog might be hurrying home. In the last sentence, the clause ‘who had been white only this morning’ allows readers to infer that this dog might have been on an adventure and been through a lot today - or at least a mud puddle! 

There are many ways to build up your child’s skills in these areas, most of which are about being word curious by celebrating language, playing with words and phrases and noticing how we put words together to create interesting and powerful sentences. 

To build skills in Language Structures you can: 

• Stop and ask questions such as, in this sentence where is the ‘noun/who’ and the ‘verb/do’
• Explore sentences by discussing how the author describes the who and the do, such as through adverbs, adjectives and descriptive phrases  
• Break down complex sentences by looking at what is the action happening right now and what extra information are we getting

To build skills in Verbal Reasoning you can: 

• Build background knowledge by using idioms, metaphors, similes and other figurative language and sayings and explain their meaning
• Look at homophones and how puns and jokes often rely on these as we need to understand two different meanings at once 
• Give children time to think for themselves - can they figure out the two meanings? Why do they think the author chose that comparison? 
• Find synonyms or antonyms for words 
• Odd one out - name 4 items, 3 relate but one does not belong 
• Forwards and backwards inferences - use inferences to make predictions and check them as you read forwards and make inferences then read back to check previous sections, such as when solving a mystery 
• Alphabet categories - choose a category and try to list in alphabetical order words starting with each letter (for more primary school appropriate categories, I would suggest colours, underwater animals, ways we move our body, or foods as some good categories to get started on!)