Do you have a child that has difficulty with reading comprehension? He or she may be able to read a story aloud, fluently and confidently. However, if you ask her a question, or try to discuss the story, you may find that your child does not know what is happening in the story.

Or you may have a child who is able to answer ‘direct questions’ where the answers are found in the story, but struggles in school as he progresses to higher grades in school, and questions become less direct and involves ‘making inferences’ from what he reads.


There are 2 parts to reading:
1. learning to read the word aloud, and
2. learning to process what you read for meaning. This is how you can make inferences or draw conclusions and answer questions about what you have read, or write a story after reading some given ‘helping words’ or prompts.

Here is a story that will help you to understand the reading process: what is involved, and why they are important.


For a long time, Haro, the nimp fizbin, was the only fizbin in the zot. Every midsee, he would cond and ren, all by himself. Then one midsee, Haro was zommed! There, in the middle of the zot, was a parmon. Haro was ponted.(Adapted from story from: The Reading Teacher’s Book of Lists)

If I asked you,”What is a fizbin?” you would say,”I don’t know.” because there is no such word.

However, you can probably answer quite the following questions using words that you don’t even know.

  1. Who was Haro?
  2. Where can you find Haro?
  3. What did he do every midsee?
  4. How did Haro feel when he saw the parmon?

I hope you can see how it is possible for your child to read a story aloud, and even score the ‘correct answer’ for quite a number of questions about a story about something he does not know at all.

However, one thing you can’t do with this ‘nonsense’ story is that you can’t visualize what is happening, and form a mental picture of how the story develops. You also can’t infer any extra information about the story at all.

If you read about an ‘elf in a forest’, that was ‘horrified’ to see a ‘tractor’, and these are words you know, you can visualize the story and infer a lot of other information that is not given in the story. You can use your visualization to answer a lot of other questions. You can even write a few sentences about what will happen next.

I hope this example illustrates to you the importance of the language processing skills involved in reading.

One important aspect of processing the words we read is to visualize. By visualizing, we understand what are some other words or information that goes with it, (e.g. ‘Tractor’ has to be driven by someone, it’s probably used for tearing things down or building something, it may be noisy etc etc).

Visualization is crucial for:

  1. Reading for Comprehension, filling-in-the-blank or Cloze Passage
  2. Mathematics Story or Word problems,
  3. Writing

Has this post given you the answers you’re looking for? Tell us!
If this has been useful for you, help us Like and Share this post with friends and family through the social media icons below!

answering questions children with reading problem fill in the blanks inference language processing skill language therapist language therapy read and answer SLI Specific Language Impairment story writing visualisation in reading visualising