CHAPTER II

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

The review of relevant literature and studies is discussed in this part. It is offered here to provide
a solid foundation for the study and to provide readers with enough knowledge about the factors under
investigation. The variables and indicators are presented and discussed in the order they appear.

Reading Comprehension

One of the most difficult human activities is reading comprehension. For instance, to
comprehend the underlying meaning of this statement, one must visually process the words, recognize
their phonological, orthographic, and semantic representations, and connect the words using rules of
syntax (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014). But comprehending each sentence's fundamental meaning is
insufficient. One must combine that meaning across sentences, draw inferences from pertinent
background information, recognize the text's structure, and take into account the authors' intentions
(Graesser, 2015).

Reading Comprehension is regarded as a vital skill in attaining proficiency and widening knowledge in
different subjects. As deep comprehension, learning, and other 21st-century skills must be mastered to
master basic reading proficiency, students who experience such difficulties are likely to struggle
throughout their education and employment (Goldman & Pellegrino, 2015; Graesser, 2015). According
to Jane Oakhill, Kate Cain, and Carsten Elbro's (2014)

Reading comprehension is one of the most complex behaviors in which humans engage. Reading
theorists have grappled with how to comprehensively and meaningfully portray reading comprehension
and many different theoretical models have been proposed in recent decades (McNamara & Magliano,
2009; Perfetti & Stafura, 2014).

According to the National Center for Education Statistics research, 43% of adults with a low reading
comprehension and literacy level lived in poverty. It also shows that people who have an average or high
literacy can break the cycle of poverty because they can have many opportunities to work full time
(Bales, 2018).

One factor why people with low literacy and low level of reading comprehension struggle to be
successful is the social impact. They have low self-esteem, fear, and powerlessness. Due to these
factors, persons with low reading comprehension levels cannot perform well at their jobs or school.
Since low-level readers cannot communicate well, there is a wall between their interaction with the
world and they will eventually leave (Gunn, 2018).
Kerubo (2014) conducted a study to reveal the relationship between reading comprehension practices
and academic performance. This study was a case study. The sample consisted of a group of three pupils
from Westlands Primary School in Kenya who were selected randomly. The findings showed that there is
a significant positive relationship between reading comprehension practices and academic performance.
Also, the findings revealed that there is a relationship between reading difficulties and academic
performance.

According to Clarke et. al. (2014), reading comprehension is a vital ability for all students because it
involves the process of simultaneously obtaining and generating meaning from written language
through engagement and involvement. Understanding the meaning of words, analyzing the author's
point of view, aiming for writing, and acquiring new vocabulary are all critical reading abilities that aid in
reading comprehension. Chen et. al. (2020), reading comprehension is a multifaceted process that
requires the integration and coordination of a variety of abilities, including word decoding, the capacity
to decipher or recognize written words, and speech or listening comprehension, the ability to
comprehend what is decoded in spoken form.

The practice of effective reading comprehension techniques is essential to enhance the extent of
comprehension among students and thus, language instructors are required to implement adequate
reading strategies to improve comprehension and facilitate critical thinking in understanding complex
texts. Reading comprehension is comprised of complicated factors; mainly comprising of cognitive,
linguistic and socio-cultural variables, due to which the development of an effective reading strategy is
difficult for language instructors (Alenizi, 2019; Ismail & Tawalbeh, 2015).

Reading comprehension is essential not just for understanding literature but also for general learning,
academic performance, and employment, according to Jane Oakhill, Kate Cain, and Carsten Elbro's
(2014) handbook of Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension. Due to email, texting, and
social networking websites, it is even crucial for our social lives. It takes a variety of distinct cognitive
skills and abilities to successfully comprehend reading, which is a challenging task. The ability to identify
(decode) the words in a text is a requirement for reading comprehension, otherwise, readers will not be
able to comprehend the entire text.

The ability to interpret language well in general is necessary for effective reading comprehension.
Understanding the individual words and the sentences they make is necessary for this. Yet,
comprehension usually calls for the comprehended to combine the meaning of these words and
sentences into a coherent whole. A sufficient mental model must be built in order to accomplish this. A
mental model is an interpretation of the text that has been read (or heard, or seen). (Oakhill, J. et al.
2014)

A new dataset and set of activities is provided that require the reader to respond to questions about
stories by reading full books or movie screenplays in order to promote development on deeper language
comprehension. These exercises are created so that comprehending the underlying narrative is
necessary in order to properly complete them. rather than depending on salience or superficial pattern
matching. It is demonstrated that humans can complete these tasks with ease; conventional RC models
have trouble with them: and the dataset and the difficulties it brings was analyzed. (Kocisky et.al, 2018).

As one of the most complex cognitive processes used by humans, reading comprehension is difficult to
teach, evaluate, and research. Despite decades of reading comprehension research, international and
national reading scores show that adolescent readers in the United States are not improving. Elleman &
Oslund (2019) explore different theoretical models for comprehension and then focus on components
shown to be important across models that represent potential targets for instruction.

Researchers, educators, and policy makers will need to work together to improve reading scores with a
focus on long-term solutions. To increase comprehension, it will be important to place an early and
persistent emphasis on the development of background knowledge, vocabulary, inference, and
comprehension monitoring skills over the course of development. (Elleman & Oslund, 2019)

Perfetti & Stafura. (2014). Stated that reading comprehension theories, or more precisely frameworks,
have evolved from general concepts to more tightly focused facets of the overall difficult problem of
comprehension. This has enabled advancement in the research of comprehension-related topics,
including the significance of the use of memory, drawing conclusions, and changing mental models. A
rather underutilized element in text comprehension research, the lexicon, is given key importance in our
reintroduction of a broad-scope framework.

Reading comprehension (RC) in contrast to information retrieval- requires integrating information and
reasoning about events, entities, and their relations across a full document. Question answering is
conventionally used to assess RC ability, in both artificial agents and children learning to read. However,
existing RC datasets and tasks are dominated by questions that can be solved by selecting answers using
superficial information (e.g., local context similarity or global term frequency); they thus fail to test for
the essential integrative aspect of RC. To encourage progress on deeper comprehension of language, we
present a new dataset and set of tasks in which the reader must answer questions about stories by
reading entire books or movie scripts. These tasks are designed so that successfully answering their
questions requires understanding the underlying narrative rather than relying on shallow pattem
matching or salience. We show that although humans solve the tasks easily, standard RC models
struggle on the tasks presented here. We provide an analysis of the dataset and the challenges it
presents. (Tomáš Kočiský, et al., 2018).

According Chege, Elizabeth Wanjiku (2016). It is common to attribute poor academic performance to
lack of mastery of the particular subject skills. However, it is possible that this poor performance is due
to poor reading comprehension ability. Local studies have recognized the importance of reading in
academics. However, these have restricted themselves to pupils' ability to decode. Though decoding is
important, the ultimate goal of all reading is comprehension. This study, therefore, sought to establish
the relationship between reading comprehension and academic performance, and in so doing provide
local empirical data that shows the magnitude of this relationship for various subjects offered in the
primary school level. In addition, the study investigated the relationship of pupils' reading
comprehension with gender and intelligence. The study was carried out in Machakos District among
Standard Eight pupils in five randomly selected primary schools.

DeBruin-Parecki et al. (2015) states that reading enables students to become independent in
comprehending complex text structures while improving their proficiency in academic and professional
skills. Successful readers tend to have a higher extent of comprehension as they are able to create
connection between different ideas, understand complex notions and reflect on the information
simultaneously while reading. Hence, educators are required to implement educational strategies that
promote critical thinking and pre-reading to develop comprehension skills in students (Javed et al.,
2015).

Similarly, reading should be considered as a strategy by the educators and authors so that it can intrigue
the readers attain related information from texts, improve their academic vocabulary while engaging in
critical reflection to promote comprehension (DeBruin-Parecki et al., 2015). Glenberg (2017) implies that
comprehension accounts as the ability to engage in adequate response to the information provided in
text.

Similarly, reading interventions in education setting enables the students to engage in the critical
reflection and understanding text, and utilize rational in order to generate adequate responses in
comprehension. Moreover, reading comprehension also includes the ability of a person to translate the
essence of the sentences using his own words. This also consists of applying the text read in one’s life.
One aspect of reading comprehension is when a person articulates some of his life experiences and
relates them to the text written. It is a sign that a person truly comprehends because some personal
emotions are attached to it (Wilhelm, 2018