The Importance of Reading and Comprehension

Reading: An Overview

• Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding printed symbols to derive meaning.
• Traditional reading involves visually processing symbols and using intellectual acumen to understand their intended meaning.
• Foreign Language teaching methods utilize a process to reduce uncertainty about the meanings of symbols.

Why Read?

• Reading provides pleasure, knowledge, escape, and learning.
• Knowledge is a key reward from reading.
• Reading also includes insight, compassion, sensitivity, judgement, and taste.
• Reading is crucial in daily life, encompassing 80% of daily activities.
• Reading is used in recipes, instructions, product labels, menus, signs, advertisements, periodicals, fiction, and study material.

What Does Reading Mean?

• William Gray (1950) defined reading as a 4-step process.
  • Perception of the word.
  • Comprehension of the word.
  • Reaction to the meaning by considering prior knowledge.
  • Integration of the idea by drawing upon experiences.
• Oliver Wendell Holmes (1976) described reading as a reasoning process with a focus on power and speed in reading.

Reading as Language Processing

• Reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game that involves interaction between language and thought. This process is cyclical, including sampling, predicting, testing, and confirming.

Reading and Cognitive Development

• Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky (1981) describe reading as involving an interaction between language and thought. They posit that children go through stages of development that lead to comprehension of readings.

• Children's development is defined by 5 stages (sensorimotor - birth - 2y/o; preoperational - 2-4 years; intuitive thought - 4-7 years; concrete operational - 7-11 years; formal operational - 12-14 years).

• Developmental examples of this interaction include different concepts about understanding the world and applying the concepts to understand reading comprehension.

Substrata Factor Theory of Reading

• Variables correlate to reading ability.
• Individual systems work together to process text at different levels.
• Working systems include perceptual, linguistic, cognitive, motivational, affective, and physiological.

Whole to Part Reading Theory

• This approach emphasizes recognizing words in everyday contexts.
• This holistic approach is contrasted with the more traditional phonetic approach.
• Children are encouraged to make connections and use words as whole units of language.

Comprehension of Interaction

• Reading involves conversation and communication, with interactions between participants.
• Various interactions exist to understand the text's features.
• Example interactions include assigning parts of interactions (ex. telling a story), assigning things to categories, inferring cause and effect, topic inferences, and sequence inferences.

Theory on Text Data

• (High frequency words) words with a high frequency of use contribute a lot in the understanding of a given sentence.
• Text comprehension depends on cohesion, staging, and content analysis, with examples to clarify these aspects.
• Metacognition involves understanding and monitoring cognitive processes.

Types and Levels of Metacognitive Knowledge

• Declarative; procedural, and strategic knowledge help process information.
• Metacognitive regulation means knowing when and how to use skills to control learning, such as self-monitoring, action planning, and evaluating processes.

Action/Reaction Strategies for Reading

• Practical response; integration, and secondary analysis.

Identifying and Analyzing Claims

• Explicit reading is identifying direct statements.
• Implicit information is implied or suggested.

Common Types of Assertions

• Fact-based assertions; value-based assertions; policy-based claims.

Determining Textual Evidence and Evaluating Evidence

• Claims are supported by different types of evidence, such as statistics, expert opinions, and anecdotes.
• Evaluating good evidence involves factors such as clarity, relevance, accuracy, and reliability.