Reading and Reading comprehension: ¿How can we improve it?
Reading and Reading comprehension: ¿How can we improve it?
We have already talked about what is Reading comprehension, how it could be altered in many learning disorders and how it could be improved. However, we have never talked about the importance of having a good level of reading comprehension in our daily lives. In this post, we would like to answer this question and share with you different techniques to work with reading and reading comprehension.
Language: ¿Do we only use it as a way to communicate?
Language grows as we do. Nevertheless, it is not only used as a way to communicate and make us understandable, but it includes many other things. Language is one of the most important means we have to discover our world. We use it to acquire knowledge and to talk about what we have discovered and learned (Castro et al., 2015). One way to use our language to discover our world is through the reading. A comprehensive reading (with a good level of reading comprehension) will help us to extract the explicit meaning of a text, make inferences, extract implicit ideas, extrapolate, relation our old experiences with new information, and include all this new knowledge into our memory (Castro et al., 2015).
Reading comprehension is important, but ¿How much?
The final goal of reading is reading comprehension. Reading competence is very important to understand and learn, that means to broad our knowledge of the world. Therefore, reading is one of the most important abilities a child has to develop during the educational period (APA, 2015).
In spite of the noticeable importance, there are currently many children having troubles dealing with reading and reading comprehension. Many of them are coursing secondary or university studies. Among the main problems: difficulties distinguishing relevant information and ignore the irrelevant, difficulties resuming a text, difficulties with specific vocabulary, etc. Hence, it is clear the importance of reading and reading comprehension as a way to know and discover the world surrounding us. Even so, it doesn’t have the dedication nor the time it should have; especially during childhood and the educational period.
Reading comprehension: ¿What could we do to improve it?
- Practising self-control of comprehension: while reading it is useful to check if you are understanding everything you are reading. You can make pauses and ask yourself is you have understood what you have read.
- Looking for relations between the text and our old memories: relate what we already know with what we are reading or about to read will help us to arrive to a better understanding. Children need their caregivers to do that job for them.
- Graphics and semantic organizers: a very useful strategy is to use maps. This can be in graphical format with pictures or drawings, and are very easy to read. Semantics or graphics organizers are materials that can help a lot to represent the material read and increase their understanding. With them we can perfectly detect keys concepts, the relationship between all of them and the general idea of the text.
- Knowing the structure of several texts typologies: each text typology (a story, a narrative, a biography, an informational text, instructions for a game or an appliance, the shopping list, a post…) has their own structure or different schemes. It is very useful to know the main typologies, because knowing its structure can helps us to recall details and answer questions about the text. It is very important to use various types, the more the better.
Referencias bibliográficas:
Factors That Predict and Disrupt Reading Comprehension. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2015, from http://www.apa.org/pubs/highlights/peeps/issue-44.aspx
Castro, A., Díaz, D., Robles, H., Rodrigo, N., Rodríguez, A., Cantillo, M., Carbonó, V., Álvarez, S., Dick, U. & Florez, G. (2015). El efecto del uso de las TIC en la comprensión lectora de español como lengua materna. Revista de Investigación Educativa de la Escuela de Graduados en Educación. 5 (10), 43-50.