ABSTRACT
Children need to understand what they are reading, and it needs to be relevant to their experience and knowledge of the world. Children who have difficulty understanding spoken language will also have difficulty understanding text. The chapter includes some basic reading for meaning activities, as well as higher level inference skills. Pictures or photos may be used to develop the language skills needed to make inferences and can be a good starting point for explicit comprehension activities. At a very basic level of reading, an understanding of very simple sentence structures may need to be directly taught to non-verbal children to help them develop an awareness of less audible grammatical words. A focus on direct teaching of lexical weaknesses is essential for higher level understanding if children are not using these words accurately in their spoken language. Systematic teaching of core and extended vocabulary will help to broaden an understanding of subtle nuances of language.
