COMPREHENSION

Comprehension

Comprehension

Introduction

Comprehension is the understanding and interpretation of what is read. To be able to accurately understand written material, students need to be able to 1) decode what they read; 2) make connections between what they read and what they already know; and 3) think deeply about what they have read. One big part of comprehension is having a sufficient vocabulary, or knowing the meanings of enough words.

The focus of the essay will be placed upon the comprehension of text aided by the use of schemas and scripts. The two will be examined and thier practicality explained. A discussion about the importance of an any given level of prior knowledge about the world, with regards text comprehension, will be faced before describing the two systems, as this is fudamental. The work of researchers that accept schemas and scripts as valid models will be looked at along with those who proposed new and alternative models. Through discussing the important role played by the two systems the limits boud to them will also be analyzed.

Discussion

Readers who have strong comprehension are able to draw conclusions about what they read - what is important, what is a fact, what caused an event to happen, which characters are funny. Thus comprehension involves combining reading with thinking and reasoning.

Students will usually express their frustration and difficulties in a general way, with statements like "I hate reading!" or "This is stupid!". But if they could, this is how kids might describe how comprehension difficulties in particular affect their reading:

The ultimate goal we strive to acheive through the use of strategies such as schemas and scripts is a precise and accurate understanding of text. This is only guaranteed by an essential prerequisite: an already present understanding of the world. Numerous studies have demonstrated that comprehension also involves access to knowledge about the world. Readers must be able to make inferences that connect explicit information in a text to relevant world knowledge, if this does not occur they feel as though they have not comprehended the text and have difficulty remembering it ( Britton and Graesser, 1996). A similar theory of text comprehension was proposed by Van Dijk and Kintch (1983) where three levels of internal representation are thought to be required in comprehension and in which the role of prior knowledge is explicit. McKoon and Ratcliff (1992) argue that though both interpretation and meaning play important roles in comprehension they belive that text representation is comprised almost solely by the later; this is constructed by means of linguistic processes, such as word decoding, syntactic and semantic analyses.

As seen in the theories mentioned there is a common belief among experts in the field that information about specific entities, contexts and events extracted from a particular text is stored in the mind and this knowledge must be accessed to enable comprehension of text. Furthermore the notion that this information is then used to create internal or mental representations of any kind is also widely ...