Comprehension

Reading comprehension is the most challenging and multifaceted aspect of reading. In the most basic sense, comprehension is understanding what you read. Text is made up of not only the words we read, but also the underlying meanings that the words and sentences represent. A deeper understanding of the text involves the reader interacting and pulling apart meaning located within the text.

In other words, reading comprehension is the construction of the meaning of a written text through an exchange of ideas between the reader and the message in a particular text.

• Reading comprehension is intentional thinking where meaning is constructed through a reader's interactions with a text.
• Reading is purposeful and active. A reader can read a text to learn, to find out information, or to be entertained.
• A reader reads a text to understand what is read, to construct memory representations of what is understood, and to put this understanding to use.

Comprehension is a complex process. It involves “metacognitive awareness” (also called "comprehension monitoring"). Comprehension monitoring is when a reader learns how to be aware or conscious of his or her understanding during reading and learns procedures to deal with problems in understanding as they arise.

Children, often starting in grade 2, can be taught to monitor their comprehension, become aware of when and where they are having difficulty, and learn procedures to assist them in overcoming the problem.

We can provide readers with steps that they can take to resolve reading problems as they arise. Steps may include formulating what the difficulty is, restating what was read, looking back through the text, and looking forward in the text for information that might help to resolve a problem.

Reading comprehension can be improved by teaching students to use specific cognitive strategies or to reason strategically when they encounter barriers to comprehension when reading.

• Comprehension strategies are specific procedures that guide students to become aware of how well they are comprehending as they attempt to read and write.
• Story structure from which the reader learns to ask and answer who, what, where, when, and why questions about the plot and, in some cases, maps out the time line, characters, and events in stories.
• Comprehension strategies are procedures that guide students as they attempt to read and write. For example, a reader may be taught to generate questions about the text as it is read. These questions are of the why, what, how, when, or where variety; and by generating and trying to answer them, the reader processes the text more actively.
• Skilled reading involves the coordinated use of several cognitive strategies. Readers can learn and flexibly coordinate these strategies to construct meaning from texts.

Reading comprehension has come to be viewed as the “essence of reading” (Durkin, 1993), essential not only to academic learning but to life-long learning.