Why Is Reading Comprehension a Problem for Some People?
A large percentage of reading comprehension problems are based in a phonics problem. If students cannot easily decode words, they guess at words instead of reading them. Since the word guessed may not be the correct one, the meaning of what the student is reading is lost. Furthermore, if the process of decoding words is slow and laborious the student gets frustrated, disrupting fluency and making it difficult to understand what is read. Students who are proficient with phonics may also have reading comprehension difficulties. This can happen if a student has insufficient vocabulary to understand what he reads or if the student does not understand how to pause appropriately to make and change mental pictures to help comprehend what is read. The inability to understand what he or she reads leads to frustration and a sense of failure. The student then avoids reading to avoid those feelings. The My Reading Coach program was developed to identify phonics and phonemic awareness problems, to
