Staten Island Reading Listening Comprehension Tutoring

Strong oral language skills are the foundation of reading and listening comprehension, helping children process, interpret, and engage with information effectively. Explore the connection between expressive oral language and literacy to learn how verbal communication supports comprehension and academic success.

• Making connections or using background knowledge – Students relate new information with their existing knowledge, which includes their own experiences, other texts they have read, and what they know of the world.
• Asking questions – Students ask themselves questions as they go through the text, including how they feel towards what they are reading and the author’s purpose. This helps the reader process and summarize information and identify main ideas and underlying meanings.
• Visualizing – Students create mental images of the printed word to understand events and situations in the text. Studies show that visualizing allows readers to have better recall of what they have read.
• Determining the importance of a text – This means that a student can differentiate between crucial and interesting information and fact and opinion; identify cause and effect and themes; compare and contrast ideas; determine problems and solutions; summarize; list steps in a process; and recall information that answer specific questions.
• Making inferences – Students take clues from the text and combine it with their background knowledge and identify answers to underlying themes.
• Synthesizing – Students are able to use new information in combination with existing knowledge to create original ideas or new perspectives.

If your child likes music and flying saucers, let’s incorporate it! Drawing and imaginary animals? For sure! These skills are targeted for remediation during fun activities, and they are also implemented into the student’s curriculum

A comprehensive toolbox of strategies is utilized to help your child. Strategies to facilitate language comprehension are taught, including:

• using preparatory sets (before reading/hearing a story, activate background knowledge about the material, discussing unfamiliar vocabulary words, making predictions about the material)
• using visual aids (e.g. visual and verbal organizers)
• understanding story grammar (make story maps – who is the main character, what did the main character do, etc.)
• comprehension monitoring to help students be aware when they do not understand what they read or what they heard
• repeating information, summarizing, paraphrasing, visual imagery, self-question strategies (e.g. what is the main idea, asking questions after reading or listening to a passage to monitor what they are comprehending, understanding character’s plans and intentions, including creating illustrations)
• using imaginary play to act out comprehension
• drawing pictures to illustrate understanding of what they are reading or listening
• understanding pronouns and connecting pronouns to characters in the stories
• understanding word relations and conjunctions (e.g. temporal words such as then, after, etc., and oppositional relation words, such as but, though, etc.)

A variety of techniques and tools that aid in literacy development are utilized, including vocabulary development, learning techniques, and a systematic multisensory approach. The Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read discusses evidence-based techniques to facilitate literacy development.