Reading Comprehension
Decoding Is Not Understanding
Comprehension depends on imagery, working memory, and the ability to hold meaning while the eyes keep moving.
Many children can read every word on a page and still not know what they read. They aren't lazy or inattentive — the decoding is just taking everything they have. Their mind has no bandwidth left to picture, process, and store.
Comprehension is built on imagery. As fluent readers move through text, they generate internal images of the scene, the relationships, the cause and effect. Without that imagery, words pass through without leaving anything behind.
We work on the systems beneath comprehension — eye movements that don't exhaust attention, functional imagery that holds a paragraph in mind, and the developmental hierarchy that makes the whole thing automatic.