Journalistic Languages Lecture 4

(Reading) Comprehension

Definitions

Comprehension actually comes from the Latin term, comprehensionem, which means “a seizing.” When you have comprehension of a subject, you have seized information and incorporated it into your own knowledge. Any kind of mental grasping of an idea or a subject is a kind of comprehension.

Comprehension is the understanding and interpretation of what is read. To be able to accurately understand written material, we need to be able to (1) decode what we read; (2) make connections between what we read and what we already know; and (3) think deeply about what we have read.

Comprehension, or extracting meaning from what you read, is the ultimate goal of reading. Experienced readers take this for granted and may not appreciate the reading comprehension skills required. Rather than passively reading text, readers must analyze it, internalize it and make it their own (what we call conversing with the book/text)

Reading comprehension is the ability to process text, understand its meaning, and to integrate with what the reader already knows.

Strategies

Teacher/instructors givestudents explicit mental tools for unpacking text.Comprehension strategy instruction helps students become purposeful, active readers who are in control of their own reading comprehension.

Understanding comes from the interaction between the words that are written, and how they trigger knowledge outside the text/message. Comprehension is a “creative, multifaceted process” dependent upon four language skills: phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

1.      Phonology: The term refers to the sound system of any particular language. Phonology is a branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds. Examples: read, red, bowl, vowel

2.      Syntax: syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, usually including word order.Syntax is the study of sentence structure and the rules of grammar. Grammar, word order

3.      Semantics is the study/science of meaning. Explicit/literal/denotative meaning vs Implied meaning/connotative/figurative meaning. Semantics, or the study of relationships between words and how we construct meaning, sheds light on how we experience the world and how we understand others and ourselves.

4.      Pragmatics how context contributes to meaning?The study of meaning in the interactional context. The study of the use of linguistic signs, words and sentences, in actual situations. Unlike semantics, which examines meaning that is conventional or "coded" in a given language, pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic knowledge (grammaretc.) of the speaker and listener but also on the context of the utterance,[2] any pre-existing knowledge about those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors.[3] In that respect, pragmatics explains how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity since meaning relies on the manner, place, time, etc. of an utterance.The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.Pragmatics enables us to apply the correct meaning to the correct situation.

Reading comprehension involves two levels of processing, shallow (low-level) processing and deep (high-level) processing. Deep processing involves semantic processing, which happens when we encode the meaning of a word and relate it to similar words. Shallow processing involves structural and phonemic recognition, the processing of sentence and word structure.

Fundamental skills required in efficient reading comprehension are:

1.      knowing meaning of words

2.      ability to understand meaning of a word from discourse context

3.      ability to follow organization of passage and to identify antecedents and references in it

4.      ability to draw inferences from a passage about its contents

5.      ability to identify the main thought of a passage

6.      ability to answer questions answered in a passage

7.      ability to recognize the literary devices or propositional structures used in a passage

8.      determine its tone

9.      to understand the situational mood (agents, objects, temporal and spatial reference points, casual and intentional inflections, etc.) conveyed for assertions, questioning, commanding, refraining etc. and finally ability to determine writer's purpose, intent and point of view, and draw inferences about the writer (discourse-semantics).

10.  Reading aloud, group work, and more reading exercises

11.  The use of strategies like summarizing after each paragraph have come to be seen as effective strategies for building students’ comprehension

Some more suggestions

·         Identify where the difficulty occurs

“I don't understand the second paragraph on page 3”

·         Identify what the difficulty is

"I don't get what the author means when she says, “Criminalizing poverty”

·         Restate the difficult sentence or passage in your own words

“Oh, so the author means that we should not blame the victims”

·         Look back through the text (understand background)

·         Look forward in the text for information that might help you to resolve the difficulty (understand foreground)

·         Making Inferences: In everyday terms we refer to this as “reading between the lines”. It involves connecting various parts of texts that aren’t directly linked in order to form a sensible conclusion. A form of assumption, the reader speculates what connections lie within the texts.

·         Planning and Monitoring: This strategy centers around the reader's mental awareness and their ability to control their comprehension by way of awareness. By previewing text (via outlines, table of contents, etc.) one can establish a goal for reading-“what do I need to get out of this”? Readers use context clues and other evaluation strategies to clarify texts and ideas, and thus monitoring their own level of understanding.

·         Asking Questions: To solidify one's understanding of passages of texts readers inquire and develop their own opinion of the author's writing, character motivations, relationships, etc. This strategy involves allowing oneself to be completely objective in order to find various meanings within the text.

·         Determining Importance: Pinpointing the important ideas and messages within the text. Readers are taught to identify direct and indirect ideas and to summarize the relevance of each.

·         Visualizing: With this sensory-driven strategy readers form mental and visual images of the contents of text. Being able to connect visually allows for a better understanding with the text through emotional responses.

·         Synthesizing: This method involves marrying multiple ideas from various texts in order to draw conclusions and make comparisons across different texts; with the reader's goal being to understand how they all fit together.

·         Making Connections: A cognitive approach also referred to as “reading beyond the lines”, which involves (A) finding a personal connection to reading, such as personal experience, previously read texts, etc. to help establish a deeper understanding of the context of the text, or (B) thinking about implications that have no immediate connection with the theme of the text.

 

 

Links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_comprehension