Sunday, February 27, 2011
Reading Comprehension
Before reading today’s readings, I did not realize that there is a process in reading. I simply thought that people get meaning out of the text/story in a book by just looking at the words on a page and grasp the meaning. However, now I realized that reading is not that simple and requires many different things. “Reading is a constructive process of creating meaning that involves the reader, the text, and the purpose within social and cultural contexts (Tompkins p.42). In Tompkins chapter 2, Tompkins has described the reading process. In the reading process, there are five different stages which are pre-reading, reading, responding, exploring and applying. In reading, comprehension is the goal why people read. Comprehension also involves different levels of thinking and the most basic level is literal comprehension which is readers pick out main ideas, sequence details, notice similarities and differences, and identify explicitly stated reasons. Today’s readings help me understand the reading behaviors of the learners in my classroom because now that I can tell by students’ behavior, where they are in reading process or what/which comprehension strategies are the best for the students. So that students can easily comprehend readings and find more interest in reading as well.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Reading is very complex and I agree it is very interesting to learn about how much you are effected by what you read, and how culture plays into this. In the book "Blink" I learned a very interesting piece of information about reading, culture and testing. One section of this book is about a test that African American students took at the high school level I believe. They tested students who were in a similar gpa. The test was the same except some students had to fill in their race and others didn't. The students who did not have to fill in their race performed a lot better. In this section of the book they concluded that by filling in their race their mind started thinking about negative stereotypes about themselves, and set them up for failure.
ReplyDeleteSuJeong, I also realized something new from this week's readings. Just as you mentioned, comprehension is a 'process', which is something that I already knew but never realized that students as early as Kindergarten were capable of actually doing. The jigsaw reading by Gregory and Cahill explained that students at such a young age can do it too; they can comprehend text by using a process of strategies such as making connections, visualizing, asking questions, and inferring. For me, this was eye opening. I had never thought about reading in Kindergarten to be more than simply decoding. The article showed kindergartners relating to their real life experiences to the content of the text, creating mental images of what was happening, questioning to help them critically examine the text, and making inferences to see if their questions had been answered. It sounds like such an advanced strategy for reading comprehension at such a young age. But I now realize that even Kindergartners have capabilities to complete such a process, a process that can be...and should be used with older kids and even adults.
ReplyDelete