We're going to talk about six skills needed for written comprehension. First of all, I want to mention that to have written comprehension, we need to have reading comprehension. This involves the ability to read and understand text, sound out words, have vocabulary, and recognize those words on paper.
Secondly, in order to have good written comprehension, we need to have good transcription. Transcription is the act of physically putting words onto paper or typing. Often, we can transcribe information by dictating; this process involves taking our thoughts, turning them into ideas, and writing them down on paper.
Third, you have sentence construction. The student must have the ability to make a complete sentence that makes sense with correct grammar and tense. This is crucial for written comprehension.
Fourth is genre and content knowledge. This category includes the different types of writing, such as persuasive, informative, or narrative writing. Content knowledge refers to what they know and what they are writing about, whether it is something they have experienced, read, or seen in a video.
Planning, editing, and revising come in fifth. Students must be able to organize, edit, and revise their writing to have strong written comprehension abilities. Executive function abilities are needed for these tasks. A lot of executive function information has been covered in some of the previous trainings I've participated in.
You can email me if you're interested in any of those. Some of those are free on my website if you are a member of our VIP program. We can also talk about learning more or receiving coaching.
We occasionally employ a graphic organizer to assist students in structuring their ideas during planning, editing, and revising. Making sure they have an opening sentence, a closing sentence, and a middle sentence is part of that. Certain graphic organizers are made to look like hamburgers.
The bun represents your opening and closing, the meat is your main topic, and the toppings are your details. This approach is fun. There's also an Oreo graphic organizer, which represents opinion, reason, and example.
There are many different graphic organizers, even a plain spider organizer with a circle in the middle and details branching off. Graphic organizers help students get their content out. Finally, the sixth skill needed for written comprehension is the ability to self-regulate.
Students might have trouble regulating their anxiety about writing. For instance, consider spelling. As an occupational therapist, I am not necessarily teaching the student how to spell, but I am helping them write legibly.
When it comes to spelling, I like to write it out for the student or spell it verbally and let them copy it. What's important is that they aren't using their cognitive brain function to figure out how to spell the word but rather how to write it legibly. Giving a student time to come up with ideas first and then copy them is a good way to work on legibility.
For instance, have the student dictate the sentence into a phone, then look at the phone to copy it. They can edit or delete something if it picked up the wrong word. They can get their sentence correct first and then write it legibly.
This is a fun way to work on legibility and spelling by letting students copy the text. We're trying to reduce the cognitive load of deciding what to write, how to spell words, and how to form letters while ensuring spacing and sizing are correct.
All those thinking skills can interfere with their content and legibility. Remember, we are focusing on the legibility of the content, not its spelling or content.
For additional information, please watch the following video: https://youtu.be/KSeRagJgYso
