Investigating the contributions of background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies to L2 reading comprehension: an exploratory study

While a number of studies have investigated the influence of background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies on comprehension, no L2 research exists examining and comparing the unique contributions of these two variables examined together. Therefore, the purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate the combined and individual contributions of background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies to reading comprehension. Data collected from 20 university-level English language learners were analyzed using regression analyses. The results indicated that background knowledge and reading comprehension strategies, operationalized as self-questioning, combined to account for a significant portion of variance in reading comprehension scores, with self-questioning being a stronger predictor of reading comprehension than background knowledge.     

Children's difficulties in reading comprehension

This paper outlines a number of studies that have investigated the difficulties experienced by children who have a specific comprehension problem: Those who have adequate word recognition skills but who, nevertheless, have difficulty understanding text. In the studies I will discuss, the performance of a group of skilled comprehenders was compared with that of a less-skilled group. The first set of studies show that the poor comprehenders have difficulty in integrating information in a text and in making inferences. A further set of studies suggests that, although such children do not have any straightforward short-term memory problem, they may have difficulty in holding and manipulating information in working memory as they are reading. A final study shows that the comprehension of the less-skilled children can be improved by a series of short training sessions that stress making inferences and integrating information in text. This finding suggests that a working-memory deficit may only be one aspect of the less-skilled comprehenders' problem.     

英语阅读中的默读与朗读

阅读是一种技巧,掌握了这种技巧,学生们就会如虎添翼,阅读能力大大提高。阅读有多种方法,本文主要谈论默读和朗读两种阅读技巧。通过默读和朗读,可提高学生阅读理解力和阅读速度,锻炼学生英语表达能力,并帮助学生在听、说、写等方面得到进一步提高。     

Sustaining continued acceleration in reading comprehension achievement following an intervention

Schooling improvement initiatives have demonstrated that moderate but significant achievement gains are possible with well designed interventions, but there is little research into whether these gains can be sustained. The present study examines the extent to which acceleration in achievement made during a three-year literacy intervention and the associated school-based practices were continued. Statistical modelling showed continued acceleration in student achievement (four months in addition to expected progress) at a rate similar to the intervention. The school-based practices associated with sustainability were part of a process of change (rather than a specific instructional programme) comprising two dimensions — organisational learning through ongoing inquiry into solving problems arising from teaching and learning and the development of professional learning communities to promote organisational learning. Effectiveness was enhanced by schools embedding the process into their normal school routines as part of a coherent instructional programme and the availability of expertise.

Motivation for reading comprehension

In a sample of 104 Norwegian ninth-grade students, we examined whether perceived reading efficacy and reading task value uniquely predicted the comprehension of a social studies text after variance associated with gender, achievement in the domain, topic knowledge, deeper strategies, and surface strategies had been removed through forced-order hierarchical multiple regression analysis. Results showed that even after removing variance from these variables, the motivation constructs accounted for additional variance. However, only reading task value was a statistically significant positive predictor of reading comprehension, whereas the relationship between reading efficacy and reading comprehension did not reach statistical significance. Thus, reading task value seems particularly important because it can override the contributions of other important constructs. In terms of education, the findings suggest that an emphasis on cognitive constructs such as prior knowledge and strategic text-processing should not make us overlook the specific importance of promoting motivation for reading comprehension.     

Does weak reading comprehension reflect an integration deficit?

Seven‐ and eight‐year‐old skilled and less‐skilled comprehenders were compared on a sentence recognition task in two conditions varying in memory load and retention interval. Integration of story information during comprehension was indexed by inflated recognition errors of foils that had been constructed by integrating information across original story sentences. Skilled comprehenders exhibited more accurate memory for sentences than less‐skilled comprehenders. However, the groups did not differ in the degree to which they integrated information with minimal memory demand, or in their tendency to integrate information and retain the integrated representations with increased memory demand. These results were interpreted as evidence that integration deficits do not lie at the root of reading comprehension difficulties in mainstream children.     

Schema effects in EFL reading comprehension

Schemata are known to play an important a role in reading comprehension. Comprehension is seen as the interaction between top-down processing from activated schemata and bottom-up processing from concepts expressed by the text. If readers activate an inappropriate schema, they may miss the meaning of the text. The present study examines the effects of faulty schemata on reading comprehension. At the end of an advanced English reading course at Haifa University, a test of reading comprehension was administered to 125 students. One section of the test contained an advanced level text about love and marriage, a text close to the personal experience of the examinees. Using dictionaries, students translated expressions and sentences and answered short-answer comprehension questions in English. Results indicated that 23% of the wrong answers to the comprehension questions were driven by schemata which differed substantially from the actual content of the text.     

National survey of reading comprehension in Finland

As a part of an extensive project for the evaluation of the Finnish comprehensive school, a recently developed reading comprehension measure; a hierarchy‐rating test, and a more conventional multiple‐choice task were used to assess reading comprehension skills in population‐based samples of 2,891 sixth‐graders (12–13 years old) and 1,953 (15–16 years old) ninth‐graders. The hierarchy‐rating task was constructed within the theoretical framework proposed by W. Kintsch and van Dijk (1978). It was designed to examine the cognitively high‐level text processing, or macroprocessing, of expository passages. The multiple‐choice task and the hierarchy‐rating task showed only a moderate intercorrelation. Girls outperformed boys regardless of the comprehension measure. Performance on both measures, but particularly on hierarchy‐rating, correlated with school achievement (r=0.44 and 0.53 respectively, p<0.001). In general, the results are in agreement with previous research. The paper also discusses the educational implications of the survey.     

英语阅读理解应试技巧初探

该文主要叙述了英语阅读理解测试的方向和目的，总结了归纳了阅读测试的5大题型及其应试技巧。     

主述位理论与英语阅读理解

阅读作为英语学习策略之一,长期以来一直是英语学习中探索的重点和核心。探讨阅读理解的理论模式以及阅读技巧,成为研究者所关注的焦点。文章基于韩礼德的功能语法,从语篇功能的主述位结构探讨阅读理解,论证其在操作上的适用性和可行性,为英语阅读教学提供一个新的视角。     

Phonological skills and reading comprehension

In the present study the mainfocus is on the impact of phonologicalawareness on reading comprehension. The studyinvolved 1300 children in Grade 1. Syllableawareness, phoneme awareness, word decodingand reading comprehension were each assessedwith two or three subtests. The results wereanalyzed by structural modeling. Due to themarked skewness observed for some of themanifest variables, separate analyses wereperformed for students with average worddecoding performance and for students with poorword decoding. Both among average and poordecoders, phonological awareness had a directimpact on reading comprehension, indicatingthat phonological factors play an independentrole in the processing of text. One possibleway to explain this observation is that atleast two critical factors in comprehension,vocabulary and short-term memory, are bothdetermined in part by phonological ability. Itmight also be the case that phonologicalawareness partly reflects metacognitiveprocesses assumed to be involved in readingcomprehension.     

A comprehension intervention for children with reading comprehension difficulties

Abstract

Many students in Australian schools today experience difficulty understanding read text beyond Year 3 despite early intervention and rich learning experiences. Often the first indications that such students may have reading comprehension difficulties is from poor performance on comprehension tests in fourth grade. After Year 3 the written text becomes more complex and there is an increasing emphasis on reading comprehension. Less skilled comprehenders experience difficulties because they often use inefficient memory strategies and do not normally visualise story content. Readers with comprehension difficulties can be taught to construct mental imagery that will enable them to link verbal and imaginal information more efficiently into their working memory by reducing the cognitive load. The indications are that engaging readers in elaborative questioning and discussion of the text improves reader's own language and mental imagery as well as enhancing comprehension of read text. For readers who have struggled for years and have developed a resistance to reading, a literacy tutoring intervention framework that focuses on a personalised responsive relationship‐based approach to reading, combined with interesting text and student choice of appropriate material, can facilitate improved reading. The Comprehension of the Narrative intervention program is an example of a multiple strategy training intervention program that utilises explicit strategy instruction in a framework of measured stages while also increasing the level and complexity of the reading texts used. It has been shown that participating students are enabled to build on previously mastered skills and develop more effective higher order comprehension outcomes through focused dialogue with trained tutors.     

Role of reading engagement in mediating effects of reading comprehension instruction on reading outcomes

The engagement model of reading development suggests that instruction improves students' reading comprehension to the extent that it increases students' engagement processes in reading. We compared how Concept‐Oriented Reading Instruction (CORI) (support for cognitive and motivational processes in reading), strategy instruction (support for cognitive strategies in reading), and traditional instruction in fourth‐grade classrooms differentially influenced students' reading comprehension, strategy use, and engagement in reading. Students experiencing CORI were significantly higher than both comparison groups on reading comprehension, reading strategies, and reading engagement. When students' level of reading engagement was statistically controlled, the differences between the treatment groups were not significant. We infer that the level of students' reading engagement during classroom work mediated the instructional effects on reading outcomes. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The role of reading comprehension in word meaning acquisition during reading

The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of reading comprehension on the acquisition of word meanings from context and to compare it to the effects of local context characteristics, such as proximity and directness of context clues. The study also examined the effects of prior topic and enabling concept knowledge. Sixth-grade students were pretested on their knowledge of target vocabulary from two expository passages appropriate for their grade and reading level. The students were then familiarized with selected main concepts from one passage and, subsequently, read both experimental passages. Half of the target words appeared in an informative context, while the rest appeared in an less-informative context. A comprehension test and a vocabulary posttest followed the reading of each passage. Hierarchical Regression analyses indicated that reading comprehension level and prior main concept knowledge facilitated vocabulary learning from context. In comparison, the effect of presence or absence of informative context clues was not significant. These findings, underline the need for a reconceptualization of context to take into account the mental representation that readers construct in addition to the printed text that surrounds an unfamiliar word.     

The role of question type and reading ability in reading comprehension

Performance on a standardized reading comprehension test reflects the number of correct answers readers select from a list of alternate choices, but fails to provide information about how readers cope with the various cognitive demands of the task. The aim of this study was to determine whether three groups of readers: normally achieving (NA), poor comprehenders (CD), with no decoding disability, and reading disabled (RD), poor comprehenders with poor decoding skills, differed in their ability to cope with reading comprehension task demands. Three task variables reflected in the question-answer relations that appear on standardized reading comprehension tests were identified.Passage Independent (PI) question can be answered with reasonable accuracy based on the reader's prior knowledge of the passage content.Inference (INFER) questions required the reader to generate an inference at the local or global test level.Locating (LOCAT) questions require the reader to match the correct answer choice to a detail explicitly stated in the text either verbatim or in paraphrase form. The relations among reader characteristics, cognitive task factors and reading comprehension test scores were analyzed using a structural relations equation with LISREL. It was found that the three reading groups differed with respect to the underlying relationship between their performance on specific question-answer types and their standardized reading comprehension score. For the NA group, a high score on PI was likely to be accompanied by a low score on INFER, whereas in the CD and RD groups, PI and INFER are positively related. The finding of a negative relationship between background knowledge and inference task factors for normally achieving readers suggests that even normal readers may have comprehension difficulties that go undetected on the basis of a standardized scores. This study indicates that current comprehension assessments may not be adequate for assessing specific reading difficulties and that more precise diagnostic tools are needed.