What is Reading Comprehension?
Before I began my journey through literacy, I would have replied to this question with one simple answer: understanding. Through extensive research, I know that there is so much more to comprehension than understanding.
Simply understanding the words of a text is insufficient for reading comprehension (Susar & Nevin, 2011). Comprehension is an active process which involves understanding and selectively recalling ideas in individual sentences, inferring relationship between clauses and/or sentences, organizing ideas around, relating prior knowledge with those ideas, summarizing ideas, and making
inferences. Reading is an interactive process in which the reader gives meaning to the text (Castillo & Bonilla, 2014). These processes work together and can be controlled and adjusted by the reader as required by the
reader’s goals and the whole situation in which comprehension is taking place, (Dadi, 2015).
This website explores the more complex strategies that work together for a child to have reading comprehension. Unfortunately, most teachers assess rather than teach explicit reading strategies. Some children do not spontaneously develop the required reading strategies. They must be taught explicitly (De Koning, 2013; Trinkle 2009).
*As you peruse this site, please note that most items in bold have links to external sites if you wish to learn more about that topic.
Before I began my journey through literacy, I would have replied to this question with one simple answer: understanding. Through extensive research, I know that there is so much more to comprehension than understanding.
Simply understanding the words of a text is insufficient for reading comprehension (Susar & Nevin, 2011). Comprehension is an active process which involves understanding and selectively recalling ideas in individual sentences, inferring relationship between clauses and/or sentences, organizing ideas around, relating prior knowledge with those ideas, summarizing ideas, and making
inferences. Reading is an interactive process in which the reader gives meaning to the text (Castillo & Bonilla, 2014). These processes work together and can be controlled and adjusted by the reader as required by the
reader’s goals and the whole situation in which comprehension is taking place, (Dadi, 2015).
This website explores the more complex strategies that work together for a child to have reading comprehension. Unfortunately, most teachers assess rather than teach explicit reading strategies. Some children do not spontaneously develop the required reading strategies. They must be taught explicitly (De Koning, 2013; Trinkle 2009).
*As you peruse this site, please note that most items in bold have links to external sites if you wish to learn more about that topic.