The nature of reading and comprehension.

Readingis a process of recognition, interpretation, and perception of written or printed material.

Comprehensionis the understanding of the meaning of the written material and covers the conscious strategies that lead to understanding.

The process of reading deals with language form, while comprehension, the end and product, deals with language –content.

Reading is a process of communication from the writer to the reader. It involves the recognition of letters, words, phrases, and clauses, and in some respects, it can be considered a simpler process than comprehension.

Comprehension, on the other hand, is a process of negotiating understanding between the reader and the writer. It is a more complex psychological process and includes linguistic factors, such as phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic elements, in addition to cognitive and emotional factors. The reader receives information from the author through the words, sentences, paragraphs, and so forth, and tries to understand the inner feelings of the writer.

What abilities and skills are important in developing reading comprehension? Researches state six general component skills, and knowledge areas of reading as a process.

1. Automatic recognition skills.

2. Vocabulary and structural knowledge.

3. Formal discourse structure knowledge.

4. Content/word background knowledge.

5. Synthesis and evaluation skill/strategies.

6. Metacognitive knowledge and skills monitoring (what helps comprehension e.g. To listen to and report on, or when they anticipate the information to come from the title)

Reasons for reading

Take 5 minutes to list all different kinds of things you have read recently. Don’t forget to include things like telephone directory, tables, maps, timetable, notices, letters, instructions, etc.

Now think about the things you have listed. Why did you read each one? What did you want to get from it? Was it information only? You will find that you had a variety of reasons for reading.

How did your various reasons for reading influence the way you read? Did you read the telephone directory in the same way as the newspaper? What was the difference?

We conclude that the way you read is influenced by your purpose in reading. The quick scanning of a page in the telephone directory to find a single name is very different from the careful attention you paid to each word in a legal document. The difference in the speeds you used was no doubt very noticeable. Whatever the reasons for reading were (excluding the reading concerned with language learning), it is unlikely that you were interested in the pronunciation of what you read and it is even less likely that you were interested in the grammatical structures used. You read because you wanted to get something, a message, you communicated with the writer.

The communication process