Language Comprehension

Language Comprehension  is an overarching term used to describe a student’s ability to derive meaning from written and oral language.  As indicated by the graphic, a student must be capable of both word attack (decoding and sight word knowledge) and understanding language in order to gain meaning from written text.

As is true of any simple multiplication equation, if either of the factors (decoding or language comprehension) is zero, a student’s ability to gain meaning will be zero.

Three components of language comprehension include:  vocabulary knowledge, background knowledge, and knowledge of text and sentence structures.