What does teaching Language Comprehension look like?
For a child to be successful in language comprehension activities, the child must have sufficient development in more basic linguistic domains, such as syntax, semantics and phonology, combined with a well developed background knowledge that is relevant to the task at hand. If a child is having trouble with a language comprehension activity, it is probably because the child has not yet developed and integrated these more basic linguistic domains. Language comprehension activities do not involve text (activities that involve text are reading comprehension or decoding activities). Instead, they involve helping children to develop more elaborate and sophisticated comprehension strategies for understanding speech. Activities should focus on providing opportunities to interact with and examine various types of language (narrative, expository, formal, informal, etc.), different genres, and different speakers. If a child’s native language is not English, activities can either focus on helping
