What is Comprehension?

Comprehension, the ability to understand and gain meaning from language, is closely related to a student’s background knowledge. The National Research Council (NRC, 1998) asserted that a child needs both background knowledge and conceptual sophistication to understand the meaning of a text. Students extract meaning as well as construct meaning as they build representations and gain new meaning (Snow & Sweet, 2003). Comprehension abilities are the direct result of active reading in which readers think about their reading, making connections and inferences to understand text.