READING LISTENING COMPREHENSION TUTORING

• 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.

Receptive language disorders involve difficulties in understanding spoken and written language, regardless of whether it’s through listening or reading. These language comprehension challenges are not related to hearing loss. Individuals with receptive language disorders often struggle with expressive language, resulting in mixed receptive-expressive language disorders. Discover effective ways to boost receptive language skills. Read SPELLTalk questions and answers about the language literacy network– which represents normal reading and writing processes and this model connects language comprehension to the literacy.

Children with receptive language issues struggle to comprehend spoken, written, gestural, or symbol-based communication. This difficulty can hinder their ability to understand questions, interpret instructions, and engage in age-appropriate conversations. 

Delays in receptive language development can affect a child’s social and academic progress. Additionally, kids with receptive language disorders often encounter challenges in expressive language, which involves using language to convey ideas. Learn what is the link between executive functioning and language. Download our What is Executive Functioning Pamphlet! 

There are also instances when listening difficulties can be caused by a central auditory processing disorder. It’s when there are loud sounds, e.g., a noisy classroom, and the brain has a hard time extricating the signal (teacher’s voice, aka speech) from the students talking aloud: the brain fails to assign the correct meaning to the sounds in words one hears. The condition is not related to hearing problems or intelligence. However, it may coexist and overlap with other disorders, such as ADHD, language disorders, and learning disabilities. Find out more about the signs of a central auditory processing disorder and how to treat it.

At Brooklyn Letters, we specialize in working with students who have difficulties processing language such as reading comprehension difficulties, receptive language/language comprehension difficulties, dyslexia, and students with auditory processing difficulties. We are experts are differentiating these different underlying conditions. 

Our specialized intervention focuses on improving the student’s listening or reading comprehension skills, vocabulary (nouns, action words), grammar (understanding complex sentences, paragraphs, and directions), and improving organization to help facilitate what they heard or read.

We let the students know what we’re doing so they can be part of the process. We also consider their interests, strengths, and learning styles, maximizing effectiveness and ensuring the students don’t get frustrated. After all, we’re not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.