Does comprehending have anything to do with being literate?

Question

i have a son that knows how to read and write but he's telling me that comprehending has nothing to do with being literate. He says that you can still comprehend even if you don't know how to read or write. Even if you can read and write does comprehension go alone with literacy.

Answer 1

Definately!! Just because someone can read the word "continuous" doesn't mean a thing! They have to know what the word means to get anything out of it! Therefore, comprehension has EVERYTHING to do with literacy!!

Answer 2

Reading is about comprehension. A person who is "reading" words without comprehension of the literary peice is word-calling, or what reading/litercy specialists referr to as a passive reader. The remedy for this issue is for the individual to learn metacognitive skills (metacognition), basically, this involves training ones self to stop periodically (ex. at the end of a paragraph) and ask oneself what is happening in the story. This is why children are often placed on a lower reading level, its to built the comprehension peice.

Answer 3

I think your son may have it confused. A person can read something without comprehending what he/she has read. Picture this- take a passage written in French and try to pronounce all of the words. You may say all the words on the page, but you will most likely have no idea what it is you said. Literate means that you can read and write. Read means that you can comprehend what the words on a page mean. I do not think that someone could comprehend a word without being able to read it.

There are illiterate people who seem perfectly intelligent when they speak. They may have large vocabularies and be able to hold their own in a conversation. But that does not make them literate. Just understanding what a person speaks to you is not literacy.

Answer 4

It depends on what context he is using the term comprehension. You can comprehend something that is said to you (understand it) or you can comprehend something which is written.

Literacy in itself is just the reading/writing. However you need to be able to comprehend what you are reading otherwise the information is useless to you.

If for instance you can read at a 4th grade level but can only comprehend words at a 1st grade level then your reading level would actually be 1st grade as anything above your comprehension level is going to be useless to you in the way of information.