Reading comprehension

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Reading comprehension is defined as the level of understanding of a text/message. This understanding comes from the interaction between the words that are written and how they trigger knowledge outside the text/message. .

Proficient reading depends on the ability to recognize words quickly and effortlessly. If word recognition is difficult, students use too much of their processing capacity to read individual words, which interferes with their ability to comprehend what is read.

Many educators in the USA believe that students need to learn to analyze text (comprehend it) even before they can read it on their own, and comprehension instruction generally begins in pre-Kindergarten or Kindergarten. But other US educators consider this reading approach to be completely backward for very young children, arguing that the children must learn how to decode the words in a story through phonics before they can analyze the story itself.

During the last century comprehension lessons usually consisted of students answering teachers' questions, writing responses to questions on their own, or both. The whole group version of this practice also often included "Round-robin reading", wherein teachers called on individual students to read a portion of the text (and sometimes following a set order). In the last quarter of the 20th century, evidence accumulated that the read-test methods assessed comprehension more than they taught it. The associated practice of "round robin" reading has also been questioned and eliminated by many educators.

Instead of using the prior read-test method, research studies have concluded that there are much more effective ways to teach comprehension. Much work has been done in the area of teaching novice readers a bank of "reading strategies," or tools to interpret and analyze text. There is not a definitive set of strategies, but common ones include summarizing what you have read, monitoring your reading to make sure it is still making sense, and analyzing the structure of the text (e.g., the use of headings in science text). Some programs teach students how to self monitor whether they are understanding and provide students with tools for fixing comprehension problems.

Instruction in comprehension strategy use often involves the gradual release of responsibility, wherein teachers initially explain and model strategies. Over time, they give students more and more responsibility for using the strategies until they can use them independently. This technique is generally associated with the idea of self-regulation and reflects social cognitive theory, originally conceptualized by Albert Bandura.^{[citation needed]}

Teaching reading comprehension

There was a period between 1969 to about 2000 that a number of "strategies" were devised for teaching students to employ self-guided methods for improving reading comprehension. In 1969 Anthony Manzo designed and found empirical support for the ReQuest, or Reciprocal Questioning Procedure, it was the first method to convert emerging theories of social and imitation learning into teaching methods that employed these powerful factors in learning through a very clever use of a talk rotation between students and teacher that has come to be called cognitive modeling. Prior to this breakthrough most all comprehension teaching were based on imparting selected techniques that when taken together would allow students to be strategic readers however in 40 years of testing these methods never seemed to win support in empirical research. One such strategy for improving reading comprehension is the technique called SQ3R. This stands for Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review. In order to get an understanding of the text, you should survey the chapters. This consists of quickly looking at the title, headings and any subheadings. Look at any end of chapter questions as well. While surveying, you ask questions about the topics you have scanned, such as, "What did my teacher say about this chapter?"

The next thing is to begin reading. In a chapter book, you would read the majority of the words. In a textbook, just read quickly for the key words. These are words seen in the chapter questions, teacher made questions and in the titles or subtitles of the chapter.

After reading a portion or section of the book, recite what you have read out loud. By orally summarizing what you just read it helps to cement the content in your memory.

The last technique is to review what you have read again. By writing down key facts from the chapter and reviewing it, you will better understand the information.

Reading comprehension and vocabulary are inextricably linked. 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. Students with a smaller vocabulary than other students comprehend less of what they read and it has been suggested that the most impactful way to improve comprehension is to improve vocabulary.

Vocabulary

Several theories of vocabulary instruction exist, namely, one focused on intensive instruction of a few high value words, one focused on broad instruction of many useful words, and a third focused on strategies for learning new words.

The idea of focusing intensely on a few words was popularized by Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and Linda Kucan. They argued that words occur in three "tiers," the lowest (tier 1) being common words such as eat and fish, the top (tier 3) being very content-specific words such as photosynthesis and geopolitical. The tier 2 words were what they considered general academic vocabulary, words with many uses in academic contexts, such as analyze and frequent. Beck et al. suggested that teachers focus on tier 2 words and that they should teach fewer of these words with greater intensity. They suggested that teachers offer multiple examples and develop activities to help students practice these words in increasingly independent ways.

The method of focusing of broad instruction on many words was developed by Andrew Biemiller. He argued, contra Beck et al.,^{[citation needed]} that more words would benefit students more, even if the instruction was short and teacher-directed. He suggested that teachers teach a large number of words before reading a book to students, by merely giving short definitions, such as synonyms, and then pointing out the words and their meaning while reading the book to students. The method contrasts with the Beck et al. approach by emphasizing quantity versus quality. There is no evidence to suggest the primacy of either approach.

The final vocabulary technique, strategies for learning new words, can be further subdivided into instruction on using context and instruction on using morphemes, or meaningful units within words to learn their meaning. Morphemic instruction has been shown to produce positive outcomes for students reading and vocabulary knowledge, but context has proved unreliable as a strategy and it is no longer considered a useful strategy to teach students. This conclusion does not disqualify the value in "learning" morphemic analysis" - prefixes, suffixes and roots - but rather suggests that it be imparted incidentally and in context. Accordingly, there are methods designed to achieve this, such as Incidental Morpheme Analysis.

Reading strategies

Before the 1980s, little comprehension instruction occurred in the United States (National Reading Panel, 2000)^{[citation needed]}. Palinscar and Brown (1984)^{[citation needed]} developed a technique called reciprocal teaching that taught students to predict, summarize, clarify, and ask questions for sections of a text. The technique had positive outcomes. Since then, the use of strategies like summarizing after each paragraph have come to be seen as effective strategies for building students' comprehension. The idea is that students will develop stronger reading comprehension skills on their own if the teacher gives them explicit mental tools for unpacking text.

There are a wide range of reading strategies suggested by reading programs and educators. The National Reading Panel identified positive effects only for a subset, particularly summarizing, asking questions, answering questions, comprehension monitoring, graphic organizers, and cooperative learning. The Panel also emphasized that a combination of strategies, as used in Reciprocal Teaching, can be effective.

The use of effective comprehension strategies is highly important when learning to improve reading comprehension. These strategies provide specific instructions for developing and retaining comprehension skills. Implementing the following instructions with intermittent feedback has been found to improve reading comprehension across all ages, specifically those affected by mental disabilities.

• Setting a Goal
• Previewing Sentence and Text Structures
• Activating Background Knowledge
• Self Questioning
• Summarizing
• Feedback and Monitoring

Today, most reading comprehension programs teach students these reading strategies using teacher direct instruction with additional student practice.

Comprehension through discussion involves lessons that are "instructional conversations" that create higher-level thinking opportunities for students. The purpose of the discussions are to promote critical and aesthetic thinking about text and encourage full classroom involvement. According to Vivian Thayer, class discussions help students to generate ideas and new questions. (Goldenberg, p. 317)

Making a connection is when a student can relate a passage to an experience, another book, or other facts about the world. Making connections will help students understand what the author's purpose is and what the story is about. You can use connections with any fiction or non-fiction text that you read. Questioning is another strategy that will greatly benefit a student. Dr. Neil Postman has said, "All our knowledge results from questions, which is another way of saying that question-asking is our most important intellectual tool" (Response to Intervention).^{[citation needed]} There are several types of questions that a teacher should focus on: remembering; testing understanding; application or solving; invite synthesis or creating; and evaluation and judging. Teachers should model these types of questions through "think-alouds" before, during, and after reading a text.^{[citation needed]}

Visualization is when a student can create a picture or movie in their mind while reading text. Use terms like "mental image" and asking sensory questions will help students become better visualizers. Another way of looking at visualization, is to think about bringing words to life.^{[citation needed]}

Reading different types of texts requires the use of different reading strategies and approaches. Making reading an active, observable process can be very beneficial to struggling readers. A good reader interacts with the text in order to develop an understanding of the information before them. Some good reader strategies are predicting, connecting, inferring, summarizing, analyzing and critiquing. There are many resources and activities educators and instructors of reading can use to help with reading strategies in specific content areas and disciplines. Some examples are graphic organizers, talking to the text, anticipation guides, double entry journals, interactive reading and note taking guides, chunking, and summarizing. ..

Reading Comprehension Imaging

Comprehension levels can now be observed through the use of a fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging. fMRIs' are used to determine the specific neural pathways of activation across two conditions, narrative-level comprehension and sentence-level comprehension. Images showed that the 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.

Levels of Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension involves two levels of processing, shallow (low-level) processing and deep (high-level) 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 and there associated sounds. This theory was first identified by Fergus I. M. Craik and Robert S. Lockhart.

Professional development for students and small children

The National Reading Panel noted that comprehension strategy instruction is difficult for many teachers as well as for students, particularly because they were not taught this way and because it is a very cognitively demanding task. They suggested that professional development can increase teachers/students willingness to use reading strategies but admitted that much remains to be done in this area.^{[citation needed]} The directed listening and thinking activity is a technique available to teachers to aid students in learning how to un-read and reading comprehension. It is also difficult for students that are new. There is often some debate when considering the relationship between reading fluency and reading comprehension. There is evidence of a direct correlation that fluency and comprehension lead to better understanding of the written material, across all ages. However, it is unclear if fluency is a result of the comprehension or if this a separate learned task.

The use of effective comprehension strategies is highly important when learning to improve reading comprehension. These strategies provide specific instructions for developing and retaining comprehension skills. Implementing the following instructions with intermittent feedback has been found to improve reading comprehension across all ages, specifically those affected by mental disabilities.

Reading difficult texts

Some texts, like in philosophy, literature or scientific research, may appear more difficult to read because of the prior knowledge they assume; they may assume the tradition from which they come, or assume having read a text which the author is criticizing or parodizing. Such knowledge is assumed rather than restated, for economic reasons, for saving time and space.

Philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose texts are considered difficult even by fellow scholars, explained that "In order to unfold what is implicit in so many discourses, one would have each time to make a pedagogical outlay that is just not reasonable to expect from every book. Here the responsibility has to be shared out, mediated; the reading has to do its work and the work has to make its reader."

Reading comprehension and hyperlinks

Text with embedded hyperlinks makes different demands on the reader than traditional text. This has been a popular subject of recent articles and books by authors such as Nicholas Carr and psychologists such as Maryanne Wolf. Their concerns revolve around the detrimental effect the internet may have on attention and reading comprehension.

Some studies have examined the increased demands of reading hyperlinked text in terms of cognitive load, which may be thought of as the amount of information actively maintained in one’s mind (also see working memory). While the research in this area is ongoing, it is clear that too many hyperlinks can impair comprehension. One study, for example, showed that going from about 5 hyperlinks per page to about 11 per page reduced college students’ understanding (assessed by multiple choice tests) of articles about alternative energy. This can be attributed to the decision-making process (deciding whether to click on it) required by each hyperlink, which may reduce comprehension of surrounding text.

Other studies have pointed out that the way hyperlinks are presented is important. If a short summary of the link’s content is provided when the mouse pointer hovers over it, then comprehension of the text is improved. Also, providing “navigation hints” about which links are most relevant improved comprehension. Finally, the background knowledge of the reader can partially determine the effect hyperlinks have on comprehension. In a study of reading comprehension with subjects who were familiar or unfamiliar with art history, texts which were hyperlinked to one another hierarchically were easier for novices to understand than texts which were hyperlinked semantically. In contrast, those already familiar with the topic understood the content equally well with both types of organization. In interpreting these results, it may be useful to note that the studies mentioned were all performed in closed content environments, not on the internet. That is, the texts used only linked to a predetermined set of other texts which was offline. Furthermore, the participants were explicitly instructed to read on a certain topic in a limited amount of time. Reading text on the internet may not have these constraints.

See also

• Readability
• Directed listening and thinking activity
• Reading for special needs
• Fluency
• Levels-of-processing

Further reading

• Heim S, Friederici AD (November 2003). "Phonological processing in language production: time course of brain activity". Neuroreport 14 (16): 2031–3. doi:10.1097/01.wnr.0000091133.75061.2d. PMID 14600492. 
• Vigneau M, Beaucousin V, Hervé PY, et al. (May 2006). "Meta-analyzing left hemisphere language areas: phonology, semantics, and sentence processing". Neuroimage 30 (4): 1414–32. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.11.002. PMID 16413796. 

External links

• Test your English Reading Comprehension Skills
• Vocabulary Instruction and Reading comprehension - From the ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading English and Communication.