Reading comprehension


Reading comprehension is the ability to process written text, understand its meaning, and to integrate with what the reader already knows. Reading comprehension relies on two abilities that are connected to each other: word reading and language comprehension. Comprehension specifically is a "creative, multifaceted process" that is dependent upon four language skills: phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Reading comprehension is beyond basic literacy alone, which is the ability to decipher characters and words at all. The opposite of reading comprehension is called functional illiteracy. Reading comprehension occurs on a gradient or spectrum, rather than being yes/no. In education it is measured in standardized tests that report which percentile a reader's ability falls into, as compared with other readers' ability.
Some of the fundamental skills required in efficient reading comprehension are the ability to:
  • know the meaning of words,
  • understand the meaning of a word from a discourse context,
  • follow the organization of a passage and to identify antecedents and references in it,
  • draw inferences from a passage about its contents,
  • identify the main thought of a passage,
  • ask questions about the text,
  • answer questions asked in a passage,
  • visualize the text,
  • recall prior knowledge connected to text,
  • recognize confusion or attention problems,
  • recognize the literary devices or propositional structures used in a passage and determine its tone,
  • understand the situational mood conveyed for assertions, questioning, commanding, refraining, etc., and
  • determine the writer's purpose, intent, and point of view, and draw inferences about the writer.
Comprehension skills that can be applied as well as taught to all reading situations include:
  • Summarizing
  • Sequencing
  • Inferencing
  • Comparing and contrasting
  • Drawing conclusions
  • Self-questioning
  • Problem-solving
  • Relating background knowledge
  • Distinguishing between fact and opinion
  • Finding the main idea, important facts, and supporting details.
There are many reading strategies to use in improving reading comprehension and inferences, these include improving one's vocabulary, critical text analysis, and practising deep reading.
The ability to comprehend text is influenced by the readers' skills and their ability to process information. If word recognition is difficult, students tend to use too much of their processing capacity to read individual words which interferes with their ability to comprehend what is read.

Overview

Some people learn comprehension skills through education or instruction and others learn through direct experiences. Proficient reading depends on the ability to recognize words quickly and effortlessly. It is also determined by an individual's cognitive development, which is "the construction of thought processes".
There are specific characteristics that determine how successfully an individual will comprehend text, including prior knowledge about the subject, well-developed language, and the ability to make inferences from methodical questioning & monitoring comprehension like: "Why is this important?" and "Do I need to read the entire text?" are examples of passage questioning.
Instruction for comprehension strategy often involves initially aiding the students by social and imitation learning, wherein teachers explain genre styles and model both top-down and bottom-up strategies, and familiarize students with a required complexity of text comprehension. After the contiguity interface, the second stage involves the gradual release of responsibility wherein over time teachers give students individual responsibility for using the learned strategies independently with remedial instruction as required and this helps in error management.
The final stage involves leading the students to a self-regulated learning state with more and more practice and assessment, it leads to overlearning and the learned skills will become reflexive or "second nature". The teacher as reading instructor is a role model of a reader for students, demonstrating what it means to be an effective reader and the rewards of being one.

Reading comprehension levels

Reading comprehension involves two levels of processing, shallow processing and deep processing.
Deep 'processing involves semantic processing, which happens when we encode the meaning of a word and relate it to similar words. Shallow processing' involves structural and phonemic recognition, the processing of sentence and word structure, i.e. first-order logic, and their associated sounds. This theory was first identified by Fergus I. M. Craik and Robert S. Lockhart.
Comprehension levels are observed through neuroimaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging. fMRI is used to determine the specific neural pathways of activation across two conditions: narrative-level comprehension, and sentence-level comprehension. Images showed that there was less brain region activation during sentence-level comprehension, suggesting a shared reliance with comprehension pathways. The scans also showed an enhanced temporal activation during narrative levels tests, indicating this approach activates situation and spatial processing.
In general, neuroimaging studies have found that reading involves three overlapping neural systems: networks active in visual, orthography-phonology, and semantic functions. However, these neural networks are not discrete, meaning these areas have several other functions as well. The Broca's area involved in executive functions helps the reader to vary depth of reading comprehension and textual engagement in accordance with reading goals.

The role of vocabulary

Reading comprehension and vocabulary are inextricably linked together. The ability to decode or identify and pronounce words is self-evidently important, but knowing what the words mean has a major and direct effect on knowing what any specific passage means while skimming a reading material. It has been shown that students with a smaller vocabulary than other students comprehend less of what they read. It has also been suggested that to improve comprehension, improving word groups, complex vocabularies such as homonyms or words that have multiple meanings, and those with figurative meanings like idioms, similes, collocations and metaphors are a good practice.
Andrew Biemiller argues that teachers should give out topic-related words and phrases before reading a book to students. Note also that teaching includes topic-related word groups, synonyms of words, and their meaning with the context. He further says teachers should familiarize students with sentence structures in which these words commonly occur. According to Biemiller, this intensive approach gives students opportunities to explore the topic beyond its discourse – freedom of conceptual expansion. However, there is no evidence to suggest the primacy of this approach. Incidental morphemic analysis of words – prefixes, suffixes and roots – is also considered to improve understanding of the vocabulary, though they are proved to be an unreliable strategy for improving comprehension and is no longer used to teach students.
Vocabulary is important as it is what connects a reader to the text, while helping develop background knowledge, their own ideas, communicating, and learning new concepts. Vocabulary has been described as "the glue that holds stories, ideas, and content together...making comprehension accessible". This greatly reflects the important role that vocabulary plays. Especially when studying various pieces of literature, it is important to have this background vocabulary, otherwise readers will become lost rather quickly. Because of this, teachers focus a great deal of attention to vocabulary programs and implementing them into their weekly lesson plans.

History

Initially most comprehension teaching was that when taken together it would allow students to be imparted through selected techniques for each genre by strategic readers. However, from the 1930s testing various methods never seemed to win support in empirical research. One such strategy for improving reading comprehension is the technique called SQ3R introduced by Francis Pleasant Robinson in his 1946 book Effective Study.
Between 1969 and 2000, a number of "strategies" were devised for teaching students to employ self-guided methods for improving reading comprehension. In 1969 Anthony V. Manzo designed and found empirical support for the Re Quest, or Reciprocal Questioning Procedure, in traditional teacher-centered approach due to its sharing of "cognitive secrets". It was the first method to convert a fundamental theory such as social learning into teaching methods through the use of cognitive modeling between teachers and students.
Since the turn of the 20th century, comprehension lessons usually consist of students answering teacher's questions or writing responses to questions of their own, or from prompts of the teacher. This detached whole group version only helped students individually to respond to portions of the text, and improve their writing skills. In the last quarter of the 20th century, evidence accumulated that academic reading test methods were more successful in assessing rather than imparting comprehension or giving a realistic insight. Instead of using the prior response registering method, research studies have concluded that an effective way to teach comprehension is to teach novice readers a bank of "practical reading strategies" or tools to interpret and analyze various categories and styles of text.
Common Core State Standards have been implemented in hopes that students test scores would improve. Some of the goals of CCSS are directly related to students and their reading comprehension skills, with them being concerned with students learning and noticing key ideas and details, considering the structure of the text, looking at how the ideas are integrated, and reading texts with varying difficulties and complexity.