Comprehension, or extracting meaning from what you read, is the ultimate goal of reading. The process of comprehension is both interactive and strategic. Rather than passively reading text, readers must analyze it, internalize it and make it their own.

Reading is the product of two components: word recognition and language comprehension. Both are essential for reading comprehension to occur.

Vocabulary plays a fundamental role in the reading process and is critical to reading comprehension.

The relationship between vocabulary and reading comprehension is two-way: they support each other. One reason for this strong relationship is that rich knowledge of word meanings enables readers and listeners to make inferences and thematic links within a text.

Put simply, the greater a person’s knowledge of words and their meaning, the easier they will find it to understand even complex texts.

While being familiar with a large number of words is important, the depth of a person’s vocabulary is also important – how well they can use their knowledge of the word and its related words in order to understand what they are reading.

Meeting Standards and Benchmarks

Every passage in Nonfiction Reading Comprehension and its comprehension questions cover one or more of these language arts standards :

	Reading		Writing
	• Makes and revises predictions about text		• Writes compound sentences
	• Uses prior knowledge to understand new information presented in text		• Follows conventions of capitalization, spelling, and punctuation appropriate
	• Visualizes what is read		• Uses adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns to make writing diverse and interesting
	• Uses context clues to decode unknown words		• Adheres lo grammatical and mechanical conventions in writing
	• Monitors own reading and independently takes action to increase understanding (self-corrects, rereads, slows down if necessary)		• Slates an opinion and supports it in writing
	• Understands the main idea of nonfiction text
	• Integrates new information into personal knowledge base
	• Draws conclusions and makes inferences about information in the text
	• Develops ideas, opinion, and personal responses to what is read