To get closer to the concept of reading comprehension we must know what are the necessary components and the steps to follow to achieve it, therefore we must remember first: What is reading? "Reading is understood as the ability to understand a written text" (Adam and Starr, 1982). Reading is first and foremost, establishing a dialogue with the author, understanding his thoughts, discovering his purposes, asking questions, and trying to find the answers in the text.
Undoubtedly, starting from the classroom reality, we recognize that, with increasing frequency, one of the problems that most worries teachers at any level is that of reading comprehension; They often ask themselves how to teach students to understand what they read. During the last decade, both teachers and specialists have set out to find, from a critical perspective, new teaching strategies based on a better understanding of the processes involved in reading comprehension in order to incorporate them into the theoretical framework they use to teach it.
Thus, the interest in reading comprehension continues, even when this phenomenon was believed to be exhausted, especially in the decade of the 60s and 70s in which some specialists considered that comprehension was a direct result of deciphering: if students were capable of naming the words, therefore understanding, would be automatic. However, as the teachers guided their activity more to decoding, they found that most of the students did not understand what they were reading.
Reading activity was also reduced to teachers asking literal questions about the content of a text, believing that with it the students were able to assimilate reading.
Consequently, children were not allowed to confront the text using their reading skills, inference, and critical analysis, which later led teachers to consider asking questions more as a way to assess than to teach to understand..
The material presented below represents a brief reflection on reading comprehension strategies; Likewise, it discusses aspects that have to do directly with the teaching and learning process and the different strategies such as: metacognition, motivation and self-regulation of learning, all this in order to achieve efficient and meaningful student learning.
The intention of this work is not to prescribe certain ways of teaching to improve the learning of our students, although it is to suggest and share another perspective that aims to rethink teaching practice based on the contributions of metacognition and strategic thinking.
Historical background
In the 1920s, based on behavioral theory, it was thought that reading was only verbalizing what was written. It was only intended that the reader repeat exactly the author's ideas; that is to say, an interaction was not considered to develop between it and the people who read a text.
The beginning of reading comprehension research was developed in a historical context in which behaviorism was the paradigm of knowledge in educational research. For this reason, the main theory of reading was based on this trend, which implied that the most important thing to learn to read was the content of the teaching; the text and the mental processes that caused problems in understanding.
Reading was thought to consist of decoding signs and giving them sound, that is, it was to relate letters to phonemes. It was believed that if a person was able to properly distinguish the letters and sounds of our language and could pronounce them well, then he could read correctly.
Other approaches to learning to read started from recognizing words (visualizing and recognizing) to move secondly to "understand" and finally to react emotionally to the perceived stimulus (Dubois, cited by Pellicer: 1990).
For this position, the meaning is in the text, so the reader does not provide a meaning but rather extracts it from the printed material, considering the reader as a taxable person, since the fundamental thing was to reproduce literally what the author had written.
This theory, called traditional, considered that all individuals had to go through the same stages of reading; there was no flexibility for different types of readers or texts. For this reason, the ways of evaluating reading were not original either, only people were asked to identify isolated words and data in general; that is to say that they copied exactly what the text said. To read, thus, was to “imitate” what the author said; it was not assumed that the reader could also think.
Interest in reading comprehension is not new. Since the beginning of the century, educators and psychologists (Huey 1908 - 1968; Smith, 1965) have considered its importance for reading and have been concerned with determining what happens when any reader understands a text. Interest in the phenomenon has intensified in recent years, but the process of understanding itself has not undergone similar changes.
As Roser rightly points out, “Whatever children and adults did when they read in ancient Egypt, Greece, or Rome, and whatever they do today to extract or apply meaning in a text, it is exactly the same. "
What has changed is our conception of how understanding occurs; One can only hope that this novel conception allows specialists in the subject of reading to develop better teaching strategies.
In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of reading specialists postulated that comprehension was the direct result of decoding (Fries, 1962): If students will be able to name words, comprehension would take place automatically.
However, as the teachers moved the axis of their activity to decoding, they found that many students still did not understand the text; understanding did not take place automatically.
At that time, pedagogues shifted their concerns to the kinds of questions that teachers asked. Because teachers asked, above all, literal questions, students did not face the challenge of using their inference and critical reading and text analysis skills.
The axis of teaching reading was modified and teachers began to ask students more varied questions, at different levels, according to Barret's taxonomy for Reading Comprehension (Climer, 1968).
But it wasn't long before the teachers realized that this practice of asking questions was fundamentally a means of assessing understanding and that it did not add any teaching.
In the 70s and 80s, researchers assigned to the area of teaching, psychology and linguistics considered other possibilities in their effort to resolve the concerns that the subject of understanding raised among them and began to theorize about how the reading subject understands, then trying to verify their postulates through research (Anderson and Pearson, 1984; Smith, 1978; Spiro et al., 1980).
Models
Bottom-up or ascending model (Gough, 1972)
The first is the bottom-up or –bottom up model. In it, the person begins with the letters and the sets of these, in a process that increases until the reader manages to understand the larger units, the words and the full text. The model focuses on the text and is only based on decoding (Artola: 1988; Sandoval: 1991 and Solé: 2001).
This model is based on traditional theory, and it was during the 1970s that the current that I. Solé (2001) calls ascending developed. The also called bottom up states that understanding is achieved through sequential and hierarchical learning of a series of visual discriminations (Torres: 1997), understanding that the understanding of a written text is the cognitive process by which it is constructed, in the reader's mind, the information transmitted by the author through the written medium.
It was called an ascending model because it starts from the smallest components and then integrates with other more important ones. In this model, before reaching understanding of the text, two fundamental processes are carried out: the perception of graphic symbols and their decoding; that is, the translation of graphic symbols into their phonic representations (Morales quoted by Morless: 1993).
Fernando Cuetos (2000) explains, through the ascending model, that reading is made up of perceptual, lexical, syntactic and semantic processes, this is how the author describes that the process starts from the reader using his senses to “extract Of the graphic signs the information.
The first operation it performs is to look at the different points of the text; this is when the eyes remain fixed, but most of the time it advances through saccadic movements that are the jumps of the eyes after visual fixations.
Subsequently, the information that is acquired with the eyes is stored in sensory memory or iconic memory; at the same time the most relevant information is stored in the most durable memory or long-term memory. That is the moment of analysis, either through global word recognition or the prior identification of its component letters.
In the same sense, Armando Morless (1993) proposes that reading is made up of the following stages: perception, decoding, comprehension, retention and evocation. The first corresponds to the recognition of the letters, the second to their sound, later, the identification, memorization and finally the repetition, which would be the result of reading. In other words, reading is not only a visual process, but depends on the reader's mastery of the surface structure, the sound, and the written representations of language, as well as the deep structures that carry meaning (Sandoval: 1991).
Descending or top-down model (Smith, 1983)
This model searches for global words or phrases, and then performs an analysis of the elements that compose it (Cuetos: 2000; Smith: 1983), had the success of considering that not only does the text exist and its decoding, but also the previous experiences of people when reading.
It is descending because, based on the hypothesis and previous anticipations, the text is processed for verification. According to this model, learning to read would imply not so much the sequential acquisition of a series of discriminatory responses, but rather the learning and use of previous syntactic and semantic knowledge to anticipate the text and its meaning (Torres: 1997).
Processing in reading occurs in a downward direction, from global units to the most discrete, in a “concept-guided” process, in which the reader is the main axis. These ideas are recognized in the analytical methods that start from the teaching of configurations with meaning, word or phrase and we proceed to the analysis of their constituent elements (Solé: 2001).
The reader does not decode starting with letters and words until reaching the main idea, but uses his previous experiences and knowledge to understand the text. If the person has enough prior information about the text to read, they do not need to stop at each word or paragraph.
F. Smith (1983), who carried out various researches on reading, concluded that they contribute more to the set of knowledge that individuals have in their brains than the text itself; In this regard, he explains that “reading is not only a visual activity, nor is it a simple matter of decoding sound.
Two sources of information are essential for reading, visual information and non-visual information.
Even though there may be an exchange between these two, there is a limit to the amount of visual information the brain can handle to make sense of print. Therefore, the use of non-visual information is crucial in reading and learning. "
In this sense, reading based exclusively on visual perception and decoding auditory signs is rejected, emphasizing prior knowledge and experiences as decisive elements in understanding, which are the set of models that a person constructs in interaction with reality.. These structures are vital to understand what is written, they are a kind of maps, which in Smith's words give meaning to the world.
People have a theory about what surrounds them, which they develop from the culture in which they have lived and this is decisive for learning, Smith explains it in the following way: “the theory of the world is the basis of learning, it has its own structure and rules to specify the relation of categories and a system of interrelations between categories (treating certain objects as if they were the same); our system of categories that is part of our internal theory of the world is essential to make sense of the world (what is not within it will be meaningless). Each category must have a set of rules to identify it, they are also part of a system and are interrelated with each other. ”
That is, it is read by the meaning and not only by spelling. That is, individuals participate actively, because the reader seeks meaning and not just letters. In this regard, Smith points out that “the way in which readers search for meaning is not to consider all possibilities, nor to make risky guesses about only one, but rather to predict within the range of more probable alternatives. Readers can derive meaning directly from the text because they have expectations about the meaning of the text. ”
The interactive model (Carrel, Devil, 1988)
Isabel Solé (2000, 2001), defines reading comprehension as the process in which reading is meaningful for people. This also implies that people know how to evaluate their own performance.
The advances in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology in the late 1970s treated reading as a set of skills and not just knowledge (Quintana: 2000).
From this moment interactive theory arises, within which the use by readers of their previous knowledge to interact with the text and build meaning stands out.
In this position, reading is an interactive process between the reader and the text, in which individuals seek information for the objectives that guide the reading, which implies the presence of an active reader who processes the text.
In this series of stages, comprehension intervenes both in the text, its form and content, and in the reader's expectations and previous knowledge (Solé: 2000).
The theory combines the ascending model because you need to know how to decode, and the descending model, because reading also requires previous objectives, knowledge and experiences, all of which are mediated by culture.
In interactive theory, the text, the processes involved for its decoding, and the reader are so important, this is explained by Isabel Solé (2000) in the following way: When the reader faces the text, the elements that compose it generate in it expectations at different levels (the one of the letters, the words…) so that the information that is processed in each one of them works as input for the next level; thus, through an ascending process, the information propagates to higher levels.
But simultaneously, since the text also generates expectations at the semantic level, of their global meaning, these expectations guide the reading and seek their verification in lower level indicators (lexicon, syntax, graphophone) through a descending process. Thus the reader simultaneously uses his knowledge of the world and his knowledge of the text to construct an interpretation of it.
From the point of view of teaching, the proposals based on this perspective indicate that students learn to process the text and its various elements, as well as the strategies that will make their understanding possible. According to this theory, a person, to read, needs to master decoding, but it goes further because it assumes that the person who reads interprets the text, does not repeat it mechanically.
The interactive process is both ascending and descending. In this regard, Kenneth Goodman (1982) mentions that the reading process “must start with a text in some graphic form; the text must be processed as language; and the process must end with the construction of meaning. Without meaning there is no reading, and readers cannot achieve meaning without using the process. ”
In the process of interaction between the reader and the text, the person brings into play a series of elements: the information that the text provides, the information that provides the context and the prior knowledge that the reader has about the text and the world (Bofarull: 2001).
Because of the cultural knowledge he has, that is, previous knowledge, Goodman affirms that all reading is interpretation and that it depends on what the person already knows before exercising this action.
In this sense, people from the same culture will construct a similar meaning but not the same, no one will understand a text in the same way, that is, in the same way as another person. In fact, interpretations can only be made on the basis of what is already known.
For the interactive model, reading is a process in which the text and the reader interact, in which linguistic and cultural processes are equally important. When speaking of previous experiences, we refer to the previous knowledge of the people, that is, the previous knowledge structures (Smith: 1983).
The reader is an active subject who will almost always search for meaning, only in very specific and almost automatic cases will he not; for example, when reading a phone number or a serial number (Solé: 2000).
In other cases, the person will seek to understand the text. Individuals will search their knowledge schemas, make inferences, make predictions, select important information (which depends on the structure of the text), and not just focus on isolated words and sentences (Goodman: 1987).
Finally, the interactive model maintains that the understanding of the text is reached from the interrelation between what the reader reads and what he already knows about the subject. Context, text and reader interact as referents (Torres: 1997).
Stages of the reading process
For Solé (1994), reading has sub-processes, understood as stages of the reading process: A first moment, of emotional, affective preparation and clarification of purposes; secondly, the activity itself, which includes the application of comprehension tools itself; for the construction of the meaning, and a third moment the consolidation of the same; making use of other cognitive mechanisms to synthesize, generalize and transfer these meanings.
Reading as a process of acquiring cognitive, affective and behavioral skills must be strategically treated in stages. In each of them, different strategies must be developed with defined purposes within the same reading process.
Solé (1994), divides the process into three sub-processes: before reading, during reading and after reading:
Before Reading
Like any interactive process, the necessary conditions must first be created, in this case, of an affective nature. In other words, the psychic meeting of the inter-linkers, each with his own: one who exposes his ideas (the text), and the other who contributes his prior knowledge motivated by self-interest.
This is in synthesis the dynamics of reading. At this stage and with the preconditions, this dynamic is enriched with other substantive elements: language, questions and hypotheses, memories evoked, familiarization with written material, a need and an objective of interest to the reader, not just the teacher.
During the lecture
At this time, students must do a recognition reading, individually, to become familiar with the general content of the text. They can then read in pairs or small groups, and then exchange opinions and knowledge based on the purpose of the reading activity.
As our work is an integrative function, this is an authentic moment for students to work on transversal content, values, norms and decision making; without depending exclusively on the teacher. Of course, he is no stranger to the activity. Its functions are specific, from supporting the activity in a systematic and constant way.
After Reading
According to the Vigotsky, L. (1979) socio-cultural approach, the first and second stages of the process will foster a socialized and dialogical environment of mutual understanding. The activity must use language as an effective interpsychological learning tool.
At this stage, the interaction and use of language is still in force, when students are asked to draw up diagrams, summaries, comments, etc. Here the work is more reflective, critical, generalizing, metacognitive, metalinguistic; that is, learning enters an intrapsychological level.
The experience activated with language becomes images of an objective nature; those who come to integrate into the mental schemes of the subject, to later manifest in her personality (integral formation). The supreme goal in all meaningful learning is that, to form new reasoning, critical, creative people, with own evaluation criteria for change.
Reading comprehension levels
The levels of understanding must be understood as thought processes that take place in the reading process, which are gradually generated; insofar as the reader can make use of her previous knowledge.
For the reading teaching and learning process it is necessary to mention the existing levels:
Literal or comprehensive level
Recognition of everything that explicitly appears in the text (typical of the school environment). It involves distinguishing between relevant and secondary information, finding the main idea, identifying cause and effect relationships, following instructions, identifying analogies, finding the meaning of words with multiple meanings, mastering the basic vocabulary corresponding to their age, etc. and then express it in your own words.
Through this work, the teacher checks if the student can express what he has read with a different vocabulary, if he fixes and retains the information during the reading process and can remember it to later explain it.
Inferential level
The reader's prior knowledge is activated and hypotheses about the content of the text are formulated from the clues, these are verified or reformulated while reading.
Inferential or interpretive reading is itself "reading comprehension", since it is a constant interaction between the reader and the text, the information in the text is manipulated and combined with what is known to draw conclusions.
This allows the teacher to help formulate hypotheses during the reading, draw conclusions, predict behaviors of the characters and make an experiential reading.
Criterion level
At this level of understanding, the reader, after reading, confronts the meaning of the text with his knowledge and experiences, then issues a critical evaluative judgment and the expression of personal opinions about what is read. It can be taken at a more advanced level to determine the intentions of the author of the text, which requires deeper cognitive processing of the information.
Strategies for reading comprehension
Reading comprehension is the process by which the reader establishes interactive relationships with the content of the reading, links the ideas with previous ones, contrasts them, argues them and then draws personal conclusions. These conclusions of significant information, when assimilated and stored by the reader, enrich their knowledge.
Morles (1987) states that "Without understanding there is no reading". Therefore, reading for understanding cannot be superficial or vague. It must be active, exploratory, investigative, where the connection or link that is made with other knowledge already acquired, provides new ideas that are important and with a high degree of significance for the reader.
From the reader's point of view, language is information provided by means of codes that must be processed. Mental processing is basically perceptual, memory, and cognitive, and involves a capacity for intelligent potential.
Because comprehension during reading consists of the unfolding of a set of activities whose purpose is the extraction or elaboration of meaning.
It is thus evident that the understanding or ability of the subjects to process semantic information is only one of the reading processes to be analyzed, since these also imply skills for handling other levels of linguistic information such as phonological, syntactic and pragmatic. Reading requires the sequential and / or simultaneous handling of specific information corresponding to the different levels of structuring of the message.
Some of the skills that are postulated as underlying reading comprehension may include: lexical knowledge, identification of central ideas, ability to make inferences, ability to establish generalizations, literal understanding and understanding of the author's intention.
That is why Solé (1994), divides the reading process into three sub-processes, namely: before reading, during reading and after reading. Solé recommends that when you start a reading, you get used to answering the following questions in each of the stages of the process, before reading; why am I going to read? (Determine the objectives of the reading), What do I know about this text? (Activate prior knowledge), What is this text about? What does its structure tell me? (Formulate hypotheses and make predictions about the text).
During the lecture; formulate hypotheses and make predictions about the text, clarify possible doubts about the text, summarize the text, reread confusing parts, consult the dictionary and think aloud to ensure understanding. After reading; summarize, ask and answer questions, recount and use graphic organizers.
The approaches that we are using most widely in the teaching of reading and in the teaching of reading comprehension, (the bottom-up approach) begins with the recognition of the smallest linguistic units (letters, words…) until reaching the higher units (phrases, sentences). The important thing therefore in this approach is to work on decoding: if the students are able to decode, the understanding will take place automatically.
There is also a top-down approach in which you bet, because the fact that the understanding of a text begins with hypotheses or predictions that come from your past experiences, your knowledge of language and of the world. The reader is the one who creates the text and its role grows.
Therefore, the interactive approach conceives understanding as a process through which the reader elaborates a meaning in interaction with the text. Reader and text have the same importance, although it gives great importance to the prior knowledge of the reader when dealing with any type of text.
According to its function, the levels of reading comprehension can be: decoding, which consists of recognizing words and assigning the phonetic meaning that refers to pronunciation and the meaning of words is a prerequisite for achieving reading comprehension. Meanwhile, the level of literal comprehension: it emphasizes the understanding of the explicit information that the text contains, if the student is not in the capacity to understand the information, they will have trouble ascending to the other level.
On the other hand, in inferential understanding: at this level the student goes “beyond” what is said in the written information, or the content of the text, because they are the ideas or elements that are not explicitly expressed in the text but the opposite implicitly.
Finally, the level of meta understanding; it makes the reader reflect on the content of the text, reaching an understanding of it, evaluating and adopting a position when making a criticism and making decisions.
There is general agreement that the strategies responsible for reading comprehension that can be fostered in shared reading activities are the following: formulating predictions of the text to be read, asking questions about what has been read, clarifying possible doubts about the text and summarize the ideas of the text. What it is about is that the reader can establish coherent predictions about what she is reading, that she verifies them and is involved in an active process of control of understanding.
conclusion
Reading comprehension strategies are procedures of a high nature, which imply the presence of objectives to be met, the planning of the actions that are triggered to achieve them, as well as their evaluation and possible change.
This statement has several implications: if reading strategies are procedures and these are teaching content, then strategies for understanding texts involving the cognitive and the metacognitive must be taught. What characterizes the strategic mindset is its ability to represent itself and analyze problems and the flexibility to provide solutions. Hence, when teaching reading comprehension strategies, the construction and use by students of general procedures that can be easily transferred to situations of multiple and varied readings must be prioritized.
It is necessary to teach comprehension strategies because we want to make autonomous readers, capable of intelligently facing texts of a very different nature, most of the time, different from those used when teaching. These texts can be difficult, creative or because they are poorly written. In any case, given that they respond to a wide variety of objectives, it is expected that their structure will also be varied, as will their comprehensibility.
Making freelancers also means making readers capable of learning from all texts. For this, those who read must be able to question themselves about their own understanding, establish relationships between what they read and what is part of their personal heritage, question their knowledge and modify it, establish generalizations that allow transferring what they have learned to other different contexts.
The strategies must allow the student to plan the general reading task and their own location before it (motivation, availability). They will facilitate the verification, review and control of what is read, and appropriate decision-making based on the objectives pursued.
Thus, shared reading tasks should be considered as the occasion for students to understand and use the strategies that are useful for understanding texts. They should also be considered as the most powerful means available to the teacher to proceed with the formative evaluation of the reading of their students and of the process itself, and in this sense, as an essential resource to intervene contingently on the needs they show. or that you infer from your students.
The important thing is to understand that in order to master the strategies responsible for understanding (anticipation, verification, self-questioning…) it is not enough to explain them, it is necessary to put them into practice understanding their usefulness. It is necessary that the students understand and use the strategies indicated, since it should not be forgotten that the ultimate goal of all teaching, and also in the case of reading, is that the learners autonomously master the contents that were the object of instruction.
If we want our students to become meaning builders, instead of passive readers of texts that transfer only information, it is necessary to change the way of teaching reading comprehension, for this we must modify our classroom practices through various strategies.
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