Reading Comprehension: Process and Strategies

Reading as a Cognitive Process

• Reading is a cognitive cycle involving the interpretation of images to derive meaning and building implications from words.
• Reading with a purpose enables the reader to effectively organize information toward a specific goal.
• The primary aim of reading is to understand the material's content, serving as a thinking process by using prior knowledge or schemata.
• Readers actively employ systems to understand the content, organize their thoughts, and decipher new words.

The Reading Process: A Three-Phase Approach

• Reading involves perceiving and identifying words to develop understanding and arrange the significance between the content and the reader.
• The reading process occurs in three phases: pre-reading, during reading, and after reading.

First Phase: Pre-Reading Stage

• The reader activates prior knowledge, previews the content, and establishes a purpose for reading.
• Students survey the selection's title and brainstorm related information.

Second Phase: During Reading

• The reader makes predictions and confirms or modifies them while reading.
• The double-entry journal encourages the reader to record content and personal reactions side-by-side.

Third Phase: After Reading

• The reader retells the story, discusses elements, answers questions, or compares it with other content.
• Students summarize information, reducing extensive details to core concepts for concise comprehension.

Comprehension

• Comprehension is a purposeful, dynamic, and intellectual process.

Strategies to Enhance Comprehension

• Skimming involves rapid reading to identify the main points, skipping over detailed sentences and phrases, to preview text or refresh understanding after detailed reading.
• Scanning is used to find specific words or expressions, using the introduction, chapter paragraphs, concluding chapter or book index.
• Underlining and highlighting key details which you think are important and/or the main ideas
• Use keywords to record the main ideas when reading
• Ask questions to encourage active reading
• Summarizing helps in verifying that what you've read is being understood

Detailed Reading and Note-Taking

Detailed Reading and Note-Taking Techniques

• Underline or highlight main ideas and important words/phrases in your own copy or writings
• Use keywords to record main headings
• Asking questions to encourage an active reading approach
• Summarize section of text in your words.

Making Inferences in Reading

• Making inferences involves understanding implicit messages based on prior experiences.
• Example: Seeing a student reading a book in the library implies that the boy might be reviewing for an examination or quiz.

Drawing Conclusions

• Drawing conclusions involves investigating after reading to make sense of content not directly expressed and using visual cues.
• In open-ended stories, readers derive their own acceptable conclusion based on the plot's events and scenarios.

Academic Paper Characteristics

• Academic papers are organized and written in a specific manner, with a clear structure to aid reader comprehension.
• Clarity is essential, ensuring all scholarly content degrees are precise.

Identifying text structure

• Internal organization of ideas help show the text structure
• Understanding text structures help students organize and comprehend academic content.

Comprehension-Enhancing Text Structure

• Recognizing various content structures enhances appreciation of the material.
• Instruction in identifying expository and narrative text structures improves comprehension, as emphasized by Taylor (1992)
• Guides or organizational patterns are useful in all forms of academic writing.

Academic Text Structure

• The academic text is composed with a goal in mind, with clear structure
• The IMRAD model (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion) is commonly used in scientific texts.
• The model has segments for points and examination questions

Academic Aims and Focus

• Establish the text's totality and components, encapsulating what the study intends to achieve
• The title reflects the same aspects.
• Examination questions define explicit inquiries that will empower you to arrive at your point.

Arranging and Spotting Examination Questions

• You need to think about the request for these according to significance.
• The presentation's content has to start broader than your exploration questions, begin in an expansive and general way and afterward slowly focus.

Body and Focus

• Create and compose thoughts that totally uphold the article's contention or position.
• Make your sentences unified, coherent and cohesive.

Methods and Materials

• Discuss what you have done in order to accomplish your aim.
• This particular section focuses on what you actually did in your study.

Results Component

• The outcomes are in a goal way.
• Using graphical guides helps in the understanding.

Discussion

• Interpret results.
• Compose and break down what you have researched

Conclusion

• The conclusion is not a concise reiteration of your outcomes.
• Represent what you have found.

Research Skills

• Research builds up realities and arrive at new resolutions find new or examine old realities
• Thorough logical examination give knowledge.

Summarizing and Paraphrasing

• Summarizing condeses the source material in just a few lines
• In paraphrasing it's important to express the ideas of the text in your own words while still preserving the main ideas

Summarizing Techniques

• Selection: choose significant thought
• Rejection: eliminate superfluous and irrelevant information.
• Substitution: incorporates synthesis.