about reading

WHAT IS INVOLVED IN READING COMPREHENSION?

Reading comprehension involves much more than readers’ responses to text. Reading comprehension is a multicomponent, highly complex process that involves many interactions between readers and what they bring to the text (previous knowledge, strategy use) as well as variables related to the text itself (interest in text, understanding of text types).

Cognitive Processes

What is actually happening when we comprehend what we are reading? Irwin (1991) describes five basic comprehension processes that work together simul-taneously and complement one another: microprocesses, integrative processes, macroprocesses, elaborative processes, and metacognitive processes.

Microprocesses

Microprocessing refers to the reader’s initial chunking of idea units within individual sentences. “Chunking” involves grouping words into phrases or clusters of words that carry meaning, and requires an understanding of syntax as well as vocabulary. For example, consider the following sentence:

Michelle put the yellow roses in a vase.

The reader does not picture yellow and roses separately, but instead immediately visualizes roses that are the color yellow. The good reader processes yellow roses together.

Selective recall is another aspect of microprocessing. The reader must decide which chunks of text or which details are important to remember. When reading only one sentence, it is relatively easy to recall details, but remembering becomes more difficult after reading a long passage. For example, the reader may or may not remember later that the roses were yellow. To some extent, whether this detail is remembered will depend upon its significance in the passage. In other words, does it matter in the story that the roses were yellow, or is this just an unimportant detail?

Integrative Processes

As the reader progresses through individual sentences, he or she is processing more than the individual meaning units within sentences. He or she is also actively making connections across sentences. This process of understanding and inferring the relationships among clauses is referred to as integrative processing. Subskills involved in integrative processing include being able to identify and understand pronoun referents and being able to infer causation or sequence. The following two sentences demonstrate how these subskills are applied:

Michael quickly locked the door and shut the windows.

He was afraid.

To whom does he apply? Good readers seem to automatically know that he in the second sentence refers to Michael in the first sentence. And good readers infer that Michael locked the door and shut the windows because he was afraid.

Macroprocesses

Ideas are better understood and more easily remembered when the reader is able to organize them in a coherent way. The reader does this by summarizing the key ideas read. He or she may either automatically or deliberately (i.e., subconsciously or consciously) select the most important information to remember and delete rela-tively less important details. The skillful reader also uses a structure or organiza-tional pattern to help him or her organize these important ideas. More proficient

comprehenders know to use the same organizational pattern provided by the author to organize their ideas (e.g., a story map that includes characters and set-ting/problem/solution in a narrative or a compare-and-contrast text structure for an expository passage).

Elaborative Processes

When we read, we tap into our prior knowledge and make inferences beyond points described explicitly in the text. We make inferences that may or may not cor-respond with those intended by the author. For instance, in the two sentences pro-vided above about Michael, we do not know why he was afraid. But we can predict that perhaps he was worried that someone had followed him home, or maybe a storm was brewing and he was concerned about strong winds. When making these inferences, we may draw upon information provided earlier in the text or upon our own previous experiences (e.g., perhaps at some point the reader was followed home and hurried inside and quickly shut and locked the door). This process is called elaborative processing.

Metacognitive Processes

Much has been made of the importance of metacognition, that is, thinking about thinking. Metacognition is the reader’s conscious awareness or control of cognitive processes. The metacognitive processes the reader uses are those involved in moni-toring understanding, selecting what to remember, and regulating the strategies used when reading (i.e., repeating information to enhance recall), reviewing, underlining impor-tant words or sections of a passage, note taking, and checking understanding.