Successful comprehension is crucial for becoming a good reader. Comprehension is all about understanding the text and finding meaning in what you are reading by extracting and constructing meaning.
Good readers read for purpose, they understand why they are reading and what they are reading (Department of education and children’s services, 2011) Successful readers utilise many different strategies to maintain understanding of what they are reading and continuously monitor their comprehension in order to determine when understanding is lost.
The goal of reading is to derive meaning, without successful comprehension, reading would lack its main purpose. Without comprehension, students may still be able to recognise and read words in a text but they would be unable to explain the purpose of what they had just read.
Comprehension is also important as it allows students to recognise when understanding has been lost and therefore they have to implement a comprehension strategy to once again find meaning.
Having a solid knowledge base about the different strategies that can be used while comprehending a text is also vital for good readers, it allows them to adjust their reading strategies when required depending on the type of understanding they are aiming for(Department of education and children’s services, 2011).
A high level of comprehension is also important for fluency while reading. Fluency not only involves the efficient and successful decoding of words, it also involves gaining meaning automatically from each word that is read (Woolley, 2008)