One of the vital skills that need to be fundamentally improved among children is reading comprehension ability. No matter in which educational system and which age level, there are always tasks and practices that are foreseen specifically to improve Reading Comprehension ability.
Reading comprehension ability is often referred to as the ability that enables you to process any given text, understand its meaning of it, and integrate it with your previous lifelong knowledge.
Fundamental Skills you need for reading comprehension of the text include:
- Knowing the meaning of the text words
- Being able to distinguish the aimed meaning of a word with multiple meanings from the given context
- Being able to follow the unity between passages, identify antecedents and references in the given text
- Being able to draw inferences from different parts of a passage and relate them together based on the meaning of the context
- Being able to identify the main message and subject
- Answering different formats of questions from the passage
- Understanding the tone of the text and its situational mood
- And, finally being able to identify the writer’s purpose behind the text
According to the national reading Panel, to sum this item up we identify them as phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. For achieving these skills and mastering them, different approaches have been on hand for many years, implementing different strategies for each section based on several factors including age, text type, and purpose of reading, etc. Some of these techniques specifically aim for developing one’s vocabulary, text analysis, and practice of deep reading ability.
Comprehending the text depends highly on readers’ ability of processing context information. For example, if word recognition is the main obstacle to processing the text, then teachers and self-study students must dedicate their reading approach toward processing more diverse words to increase their capacity for reading high-level academic and professional texts.
It comes to great importance when working with children and using such strategies. It takes a lot of patience and guidance while keeping the practices up on creative examples. The strategy of your guidance should be followed with continuous practice; meanwhile, their skills increase, and the guidance level should be decreased, why? Because the main goal of these guided tasks is that the children will be able to automatically use these strategies on their own.
Reading Comprehension levels
Three levels of reading comprehension include:
- Literal Comprehension
- Interpretive
- Applied Comprehension
Level 1, Literal Comprehension:
Known as the most basic and primary level of comprehension in someone’s reading; the Literal comprehension definition is understanding information and facts directly and immediately stated in the context. The strategy that Students are usually taught to employ literal comprehension skills consists of these three famous items– keywords, skimming, and scanning. These are the first prerequisite routes of a reading class and are usually taught not only to the children and in elementary schools, but also to middle schoolers, high school students, and sometimes in some curriculums even higher degree program applicants need to consciously place their transition in between the stages along with the strategies taken on hand for improving their previous skills and merge them with the new ones the discover while leveling up the complexity of the challenges ahead.
Now let’s define them:
– Keywords: those words that carry key meanings and describe the main concept and purpose of the writer should be highlighted or underlined for a better approach.
– Skimming: Reading the text way quickly just to get the main idea of it. This is mostly done by headings, subheadings, pictures, tables, etc. along with their descriptions.
– Scanning: identifying and marking up the particular elements and specific details that can help us fulfill our purposes and tasks out of the context like telling a summary or answering questions. For sake of doing this, we usually need to highlight the names, dates, reasons, and main concepts whether it’s an action verb or an adjective, or any other element that our eyes need to easily point them when needed.
Literal is a mix of these three stages, that continuously gets more and more complicated to help us better process the text. You can make this stage with a better outcome and more achieving results by asking some questions including:
What words state the main concept of the texts?
How could the author summarize this text?
What happened at every stage of the given timeline in the text?
How are these things alike? How are they different?
Level 2, Interpretive
In an Interpretive, which is sometimes referred to as parallel level, the focus of the reader shifts to reading between the lines, based on the meaning of the text or summarizing the text being studied. It requires readers to place together pieces of information to form and collect more ideas about the author’s purposes and messages.
Usually at this stage students need to be directed to recognize these imaginative relationships to improve comprehension and reduce the risk of being overwhelmed with the complexity of several items featuring a text, including visual, audible, or readable text.
Many of the results and accomplishments that are expected from the students to showcase their overall comprehension of the text occur at this level; these outcomes and expectations involve interpreting figurative language, determining the mood, predicting outcomes, drawing conclusions, and judging the author’s point of view.
Through this step, questions that help you better achieve the goal of this stage are identified and listed as the following:
2. What is the theme? Try to analyze and be creative as much as needed based on the general topic you are conducting your studies on.
1. What does the author value?
3. What effect does this character or event is having on the overall text, the timeline, including the story, etc?
4. Your thoughts and predictions on the ending and concluding the context.
Level 3: Applied Comprehension
If we want to explicitly the main idea of Applied Comprehension, we need to indicate the purpose and reason behind what the author is stating. For having a high level of comprehension, we, as readers are required to use external criteria from our own experience to be able to evaluate the quality and values of the given text, the author’s reasoning, simplifications, and generalizations.
As readers are going through the text, encountering the timeline of achieving the purpose of an audience, in between its levels, they are continuously reacting emotionally and intellectually to the included material. These feelings, reactions, judgments, etc. vary from one person to another, why? Because everyone’s experiences are different from each other; Whether they can link them to what they are comprehending from the text or not?
Let’s jump to the question related to 3rd level:
1. Could this or that possibly happen?
2. Is this argument even logical? What are the reasons?
3. What alternatives can be replaced here? Based on what?
4. Is this a fact or an opinion?
5. Do you agree or disagree with the author?
6. What is the best solution to this problem?
History of Reading Comprehension Tactics
Initially, most reading comprehension teaching was based on Transition and imparting several selected techniques for each specific genre that when all of them were taken together could allow students to more strategically process any type of text with any possible given problems to solve and complete post-reading a context. However, from the 1930s testing, various methods never seemed to win support in empirical research.
Between the years 1969 and 2000, a significant number of reading comprehension strategies were devised specifically for teaching students to employ self-guided methods, to improve their reading comprehension. Some empirical approaches from fundamental teaching theories proved some strategies, shaped and corrected another group, and refused another group totally because of not showing the expected aimed results in students reading comprehension test results.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, comprehension lessons generally consist of answering the teacher’s questions or writing responses, reasoning, and leveraging their idea on the theme and some other related activities. The teacher or the educational material can add prompts to guide the answers and discussion. Students individually respond to portions of the text (content area reading) and improve their writing skills at the same time. In the last quarter of the 20th century, results show that academic reading test methods were more successful in assessing rather than imparting comprehension or giving realistic insight. Instead of using the previous response registering method, research, and studies have concluded that an effective approach to teaching reading comprehension is to provide novice readers with a bank of “practical reading strategies” or tools to interpret and analyze different categories and styles of context.
Conclusion
Reading Comprehension is a dominant factor that needs to be continuously improved among students. Little children from the moment they start learning and compounding the alphabet are proposed these methods and try them bit by bit and advance the level of these techniques, materials, and tools they imply for reading in every single purpose they look for. That’s why Reading Comprehension is a lifelong and key skill for all people.
