Carol Tolman Presents: Language Structures and Verbal Reasoning: Missing Links in Close Reading
Gough and Tunmer’s Simple View of Reading (SVR) identifies two major components to reading comprehension: word recognition and language comprehension. Dr. Tolman’s presentation focuses on language comprehension; specifically, on the areas of language structures and verbal reasoning, two often-ignored components of reading comprehension lessons crucial to the success of reading deeply. Increasing teachers’ awareness of how to analyze sentence types, develop sentence sense, and predict complex sentence structures is key to supporting students’ understandings of what they read and hear. Additionally, marking text to identify pronouns and their references, along with analyzing the cohesiveness of an author’s work, provides a deeper understanding of written discourse.