Comprehension
Comprehension is the fundamental objective of reading education and is defined as “the act of
understanding what is read, heard, or seen” (Norton, 2007, p. 217). Crawley and Merritt (2004) stated that
the “main purpose of reading is to understand or comprehend the communication between the author and
the author’s audience” (p. 112).
As Crawley and Merritt (2004) state, “Students become active readers when they engage in
inferential comprehension” (p. 143). The purpose of inferring is to “use context clues to crack open
vocabulary” (Harvey & Goudvis, 2007, p.139). As readers develop, they learn to use their background
knowledge and the clues they find in the text to understand what an unfamiliar word means (Harvey &
Goudvis, 2007).
Harvey and Goudvis (2007) call activating background knowledge a strategy for making a “bridge
from the new to the known” (p. 17). A teacher preparing for a lesson on Zebras, for example, could show a
picture of a Zebra and ask students to tell her what they know about the animal. In doing this before
reading, teachers make connections of “actual or vicarious experiences of students” to the material about
to be presented (Crawley & Merritt, 2004, p. 119). Norton (2007) states, “a reader uses prior knowledge
when developing understanding of specific types of texts, events that are described in a text, and clues in a
text that help readers create meaning from the text” (p. 218). When students activate background
knowledge, they bring their own “experiences, conceptual understandings, attitudes, values, skills, and
strategies to a text situation” (Vacca & Vacca, 2002, p. 20).
Visualizing, or mental imagery, is “creating visual, auditory, tactile, or olfactory images in one’s
mind” (Crawley & Merritt, 2004, p. 143). This strategy is “used to identify and clarify students’ prior
knowledge of a subject before they begin a study of the topic, to set the mood or change the mood for a
literature selection being read to the students, and to describe a setting or details related to a content
area” (Norton, 2007, pp. 221-222). Using the strategy of visualizing before students are to read a story
about a boy who lives on a ranch in Montana can help set the stage. The teacher could ask the students to
close their eyes while she describes the beauty of the mountains with snow heavy on the evergreen’s
branches and how the cold can get all the way down to one’s bones, or she could talk about the still of the
forest or the rustle of the grasses in the wind high upon the mountain, the smells of the barn and the feel
of sliding off the saddle after a long ride. Through visualizing we can open our other senses and involve
them in the reading experience.
Harvey and Goudvis (2007) stated that “what we determine to be important in text depends on our
purpose for reading it” (p. 19). For fiction text the focus may be on a character and the events of the story,
and for nonfiction text the focus may be to learn something new or expand our knowledge of something
we already know (Harvey & Goudvis, 2007). The “reason for determining important ideas is that they are
the ones we want to remember” (Harvey & Goudvis, 2007, p. 19).
“Of all the techniques used to determine comprehension of text, the oldest and still the most
popular is to ask students a few questions” (Taylor, Harris, Pearson, & Garcia, 1995, p. 266). Asking
questions of students prior to reading determines the purpose for the reading and activates schema (Harris
& Sipay, 1990). After reading questions focus on summarizing and organizing text, and during reading
questions help a student to better process text (Gunning, 2004). Harvey and Goudvis (2007) point out that
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