Reading Comprehension

Reading Comprehension

In any interaction with a text, the text is pretty much useless unless the reader can comprehend the meaning of that text. Since narrative, expository, and poetic texts all have different reasons for being written, and different forms of presenting the text, different strategies are needed to comprehend these texts. There are also many reading strategies that can be used for all of these types of text.

In order to describe strategies to help develop activities that facilitate comprehension of narrative, expository, and poetic texts one must first have an understanding of what comprehension means, they then need a better understanding of how the human brain works. “Comprehension is a creative, multifaceted thinking process in which students engage with the text,” Judith Irwin (1991) defines comprehension as a readers process of using prior experiences and the author’s text to construct meaning that’s useful to that reader for a specific purpose.” (Tompkins, 2010,p. 258)

With both of these definitions of comprehension they use the word process in the definition. The use of this word implies that comprehension is not immediate and there is a process that can be used to obtain it. This process, uses both the working memory and the long term memory portion of the brian, and a brief understanding of this process is essiential. There is a limit to what a person can hold in short term memory and the strategies used to teach comprehension must take this into consideration. By using strategies that limit the amount of information that is used in short term memory, the student can process this information and arrive at a better comprehension of what they read. The goal of reading is to put the comprehension of w...

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