Text Comprehension
A Retrospective, Perspective, and Prospective
Guiding Question
How have changing text forms, development of new theories, variety of reading outcomes and reformation of reading instruction altered the understanding of text comprehension?
Three Phases of Text Comprehension
Retrospective
- 1960s & 1970s United States classrooms
- Direct instruction (Osborn, 1968) & explicit strategy instruction were used to address comprehension problems (Pearson & Gallagher, 1983).
- Emphasis was on the importance of background knowledge impacting reading comprehension.
- Schools still focused on the 3 Rs: recitation, repetition, and replication.
- Basal programs with controlled text were used to develop skills.
- Readers extracted and assembled information from text and matched it to prior knowledge.
- Comprehension was assumed to happen on its own.
Perspective
- Constructive-integrative models = reader builds own mental representations based on text
- Interaction of bottom-up and top-down: reader's knowledge and context (Goldman & Rakestraw, 2000; van den Broek, Young, Tzeng, & Linderholm, 1999)
- "Text understanding is the dynamic process of constructing coherent representations and inferences at multiple levels of text and context, within the bottleneck of a limited capacity of working memory. (p. 350)." p. 231
- Much of the research has focused on narrative text.
- Meaning is constructed from mental representations of text and background knowledge.
- Readers use integration, elaboration, and interpretation.
- Prior to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), readers were generally encountering a single text.
- There is a growing disconnect between best practices for reading instruction and government mandates.
- Reading situations are growing to include informational texts and non-traditional and digital texts.
- Evidence is showing existing models of comprehension instruction to not need to be expanded, rather there needs to be a reconceptualization.
Prospective
- What makes a reading situation "reading?"
- Comprehension is being viewed more as a "connective activity" rather than construction.
- Conceptual and developmental frames:
- Moving toward a phenomenological view: "look at the experience of reading and the approach to reading as a gestalt"
- Reintegrates reader, text, activity, process and product
- Motivational and sociocultural influences:
- Readers come to text with specific goals, expectations, and beliefs.
- Emotional and sociocultural features will impact readers' mental formations.
- Nature of reading programs must shift along with instructional models.
- Assessment practices must adjust to multiple texts and representations.
References
Israel, S.E. & Duffy, G. G. (2009). Handbook of research on reading comprehension. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis
Kaylynne Christenson
2-4 Literacy Coach
Email: kchristenson@boone.k12.ia.us
Website: http://dorwaystoliteracy.blogspot.com/
Location: 1903 Crawford Street, Boone, IA, United States
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