Abstract
Understanding text is a very complex issue for students. Majority of the young readers fail to connect thought during reading, thus suffer from inability to reveal comprehensive meaning of text. Good reading habits entail ability to question, search for context proof within text, reread and find more meaning. The learner must be in a position to move through text and understand meaning during comprehension.
Reading is an interaction process between the reader and the manuscript. This process guides reading frequency or automaticity, where the reader is able to interconnect dynamic texts to find exact meaning.
There are various purposes of reading and each determines the appropriate approach or strategy that a learner ought to take. The reading may be for enjoyment, to analyze text critically, for a purpose of gaining knowledge, to learn fluency or become skilled in a particular language.
Introduction
Educators often ask students to reads and make worksheet reports about their reading, instead of ensuring that learners are able to comprehend meaning from reading materials. Comprehension calls for teachers to utilize more real world or practical examples and enforce instructions that motivate learners. An educator can implement various reading comprehension strategies in the aim of enhancing practicability.
Some of the main strategies implemented worldwide by a number of proficient readers include ability to determine the important points from a reading.
This calls for one to identify themes, and academic augments that focus to the less important thoughts or ideas. Secondly, it is critical to depict presumptions from the reading. This requires the reader to find some background knowledge of the text, interpret details, and generate logical conclusions.
Comprehension also requires use of prior knowledge as well as experiences to realize meaning from text. The reader should in addition inquire about the writing before, during the period of reading and after analysis. This strategy assists in monitoring of ability to understand and find out if the text makes sense.
Lastly, it is important for the reader to engage mental images or pictorial presentations as a measure of enhancing experience. It is not possible to implement any of this critical measure unless the educator is in a position to take appropriate actions and strategies to guide the learner.
This research paper forms an analysis of five teaching strategies, required to promote reading comprehensions. The analysis is a comparison of various journal literatures.
Different teaching strategies to use for reading comprehension
Determining which text is important
For students to prosper in acquiring reading comprehension, they ought to have basic knowledge that pertain to reading as opposed to only boast learning aspects as set out on the course outlines. More traditional ways of enhancing comprehensions include the ability to follow functions fluently form the basic to the technical levels.
The teachers have to learn strategies of building teaching skills by consciously learning reading policies and rules, to gaining control over learners’ activities.
This helps pupils to interrelate learnt skills automatically and effectively. Ability to determine what is important is a function of learning, where educators have to apply the practical strategy, to promote the students’ personal output skills they have learned or mastered (Just et al, 1982).
One of the critical roles of the educator is to determine the text that must be used during teaching, and choose the suitable text for different students depending on their levels of study and abilities. Text used during different comprehension phases is suitable for particular applications or specific strategies to enhance learning. The teacher must be in a position to put emphasis on creation of links between text and applications.
During the choosing procedure, the text must be in line with the practical implementation for instance, if the text is suppose to trigger predictability, then it ought to be new for the students, and contain sequential events, which have sufficient clues for possible predictions.
All these strategies have to keenly cater for basic learners or first determine the level of learning and other aspects such as background knowledge, amount of vocabulary build and ability to decode meaning. Initial language learners should have lighter encounters (Just et al, 1982).
Drawing Inferences
The most important reason for learning is to conveying information and meaning. The ability of the acquirer to embrace and appreciate learning is what determines future endeavours.
Acquisition of knowledge or skills does not entail the use of extensively conscious regulations or hard drilling as many people especially parents would think. It instead requires the teacher to be patient with the learner, since the process is gradual. Fluency and proficiency comes later when the student start to specialize in the subject matter (Dole et al, 1991).
A good tutor must have huge amounts of input for enhancing learning. One major effort that is required and almost definite is keenness. Most learners suffer from anxiety because they lack patience and proper contributions for their attempts.
According to Dole et al (1991), the effective way of learning is to recognize that improvements are only achievable if the input is comprehensible to the learner and not forcible for an output. Rhetorically one would question if the output were the most essential aspects for learners. What would a teacher require for professionalisms and proficiency?
Strategy of asking Questions
Research studies have articulated input and output as essential aspects in acquisition of knowledge. Interaction is also an ignored but very important aspect of enhancing learning activities. The input stands for contribution or participation effort of the learner, while the output is productivity or end results received from the learner.
The ability to comprehend and apply meaning enhances the ability to gather more knowledge regarding the subject matter. The teacher must ensure that the learning atmosphere supports abilities to acquire comprehensible input and he/she must act as an assistant in the acquisition process (Swain, 1998).
Common suggestions from researchers indicate need to emphasize importance of ensuring learners comprehend and are in a position to thoroughly understand meaning, as well present a different view of logical outputs from the knowledge. Assisting to analyze and find meaning from phrasal verbs, idiomatic expressions, and hidden meaning in text assist the learner in comprehension of meaning.
Personal interpretation of meaning by the learner enhances the required communication for effective comprehension. If learners present personal opinions, they would be in a better position of acquiring more information.
It is thus logical to consider this as real time learning, where learners make use of their target to acquire more, as opposed to only receiving the classroom input knowledge from the teacher concerning their study (Swain, 1998).
In accordance with Swain (1998), there are four functions of involving questions and answer forums during learning. Students are able to find output as the fluency or skill-building function. They notice, comprehend and generate meaning from what they read.
Questions evoke the conscious mind for reaction, and equally trigger the deep thoughts of the reader. They are also able to know the main characters in cases of a narration and understand the theme. These useful reading utilities assist learners in comprehension of abilities and skills to improve easily and most importantly enjoy reading (Swain, 1998).
Creating Mental Images
In accordance with Hansen (1982), learners are able to hear and mentally visualize what they read in context and thus concentrate on the meaning. This definition indicates that educators are in a position to enhance knowledge acquisition from an interactive environment, by assisting to create the mental images.
This means that learners first learn, and then acquire knowledge, thus showing ability to understand content. They are in a position to manipulate or formulate their personal meaning.
With a close reference to Hansen interpretation over teaching (1982), students habitually refuse to show interest during learning because the explanation and the mental representation of the clarification fall short of visual representation of meaning. Educator’s visual representation produces more students’ output and ability to overcome failure due to enhanced comprehension of the reading.
Monitoring Comprehension and Meaning
The teacher must identify and acknowledge the learner’s ability to raise meaning from a reading through conceptualization. In the process of reading, the teacher must be in a position to point out learners’ abilities by understanding their competence, and achievement in relation to what is required of them.
The teacher’s ability to monitor functions indicates possibilities to get a triggering factor, to enhance extra knowledge pertaining reading abilities and needs to improve already existing knowledge. Monitoring also enables educators to determine the levels which students are able to comprehend (Chun, 2005).
During monitoring by the educator, the learners have chance to tryout their personal understanding or objectives regarding reading and receive instant feedback clearly or perfectly during the comprehension procedures. The teacher provides learners with a chance to connect easily with what they are learning through keen monitoring (Chun, 2005).
Learners acquire new knowledge and at the same time improve attained knowledge pertaining reading, when their tutor is in a position to monitor and guide them through, in a systematic manner. The reading occurs through comprehending meaning from text and in the process, collaboration between the student and teacher assists in enhancing the process and reshaping experiences.
Monitoring is therefore part of what constitutes teaching (Chun, 2005). Comprehensible output emerges from comprehensible input, thus the need for teachers’ ability to guide and monitor progress. Chun’s argument was that inputs requirements in the process of learning to read need to be comprehensible since the process entails receiving signals and messages during communication (2005).
Conclusion
Overall inaccuracy in teaching is evidently due to lack of familiarity or poor control of complexities involving student learning. Learners require time and opportunity to produce meaning, because the issue of understanding new structure is not quite enough for their learning abilities depending on the level and amount of content.
Students’ learning therefore calls for a chance of increase opportunity to understand output and thus advance comprehension skills. This would assist them in overcoming problems, which mostly include accentuated comprehension and the immersion programs during the learning process. This tactic enhances the focus created on comprehension efforts.
Moreover, as a mechanism to help find meaning from text, there is need to increase output levels such as preciseness, rationality and appropriateness. The learners must collect a lot of information regarding the competency in the learning process for them to communicate or convey meaning.
Application of proper teaching strategies therefore causes appropriate and practical way of enhancing student’s ability to garner meaning from text.
Today, the main problems that the process of acquiring knowledge faces fall on the learners and tutors’ roles. They are the primary input and output to encourage learning or ability to comprehend meaning from reading. The learner must gather skills of reading text other than just learning how to read.
References:
Chun, D. (2005). Research on text comprehension in multimedia environment. Language Learning and Technology (LLC) Journal, 1, 60-80.
Dole, J., Duffy G., Roehler, L., and Pearson, D. (1991). Moving From the Old to the New: Research on Reading Comprehension Instruction. Sage Journal. 61(2), 239-264.
Hansen, J. (1982). The effects of inference training and practice on young children’s reading comprehension. University of New Hampshire Journal.
Just, M., Carpenter, P., and Woolley, J. (1982). Paradigms and Processes in Reading Comprehension. Carnegie-Mellon University journal, Ill(2), 228-238.
Swain, M. & Lapkin, S. (1998). Interaction and second language learning: Two Adolescent French immersion students working together. The Modern Language Journal, 82(3), 320-337.