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.
