CHAPTER 8

COMPONENTS OF
READING
COMPREHENSION
REPORTER BY: G.A.L
COMPONENTS OF READING COMPREHENSION

INTRODUCTION
 READING COMPREHENSION is a multicomponent, complex process that
involves many interaction between the reader and what s/he bring to the text,
as well as variables related to the text itself.
 Many comprehension strategies like
 Discovering Main Idea, Identifying Detail, sequencing Events
 Using Context, Getting facts, Identifying Bias and Prejudice
 Using Prior Knowledge and so on…
 Case Study
Dr. Harada had asked Jay to stop in during office hours to discuss his failing midterm grade in freshman
economics. When he arrived, Jay was pretty discouraged. He told Dr. Harada that he just couldn’t understand
the textbook. Looking at the most recently assigned chapter, Dr. Harada asked him which concepts he was
having trouble with, and Jay replied, “I’m not sure; just all of it, I guess,” Dr. Harada then asked what he
usually did when he had trouble reading a textbook, and Jay said that his books in high school had not been
this hard. With this textbook, even though he often went back and read the whole chapter over again, lots of
times he still just didn’t “get it.”

He said he also felt at a disadvantage because so many of the other students, all intended business majors like
himself, had obviously taken an economics course in high school, but his high school had not offered one.
When Dr. Harada asked him what had led him to major in business, Jay said his parents had thought it would
help him get a good job, like his father’s in middle management in a large company. Jay himself had not yet
held a job. His parents had handled all the financial aspects of applying for students aid and paying for tuition
and room and board in the dorms, and had deposited a small amount for spending money each month in a
checking account they had opened for Jay, the first he had ever had. Dr. Harada realized that Jay had never
seen a W-2 form or signed a lease or even had to shop for groceries for himself. He didn’t know how much
his father earned or how his family budgeted their income. Jay said that he had always thought it would be
exciting to own his own business, with the chance to make it big like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but
Doctor Harada realized that Jay had a long way to go.
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE..

WHAT IS PRIOR
KNOWLEDGE?

• Is the information and

educational context a
learner already has before
they learn new information
VIEW OF THEORIES OF READING

Simple view of reading subsumes the influence of prior

Hoover & Gough’s (1990) - knowledge under listening comprehension.

Schema theoretic view of reading comprehension are

Anderson & Pearson’s (1984) - defined as construction of prior knowledge in the
mind.

C-1 model of reading, some of the proposition used to create the

initial text base are drawn from prior knowledge, and the final step
Kintsch’s (1988) - of the model involves integrating the situation model of the text
into the reader’s existing knowledge base.
 That prior knowledge strongly impacts reading
DOCHY, SEGARS, & BUCHL, 1999 - comprehension is a finding so frequent and
robust in research on reading that it is basically
beyond question.

ALLINGTON & CUNNINGHAM (2006) - That “the most important factor in

determining how much readers will
comprehend… about a given topic is their
level of knowledge about the topic.
 EFFECTS ON PROCESSING SPEED AND EFFICIENCY
 Prior knowledge not only provides the
background we use to contextualize and
understands what we read, it can impact the
actual processing of the text we read.

KAAKINEN, HYONA, & KEENAN (2003)

- Found that readers reading previously unseen texts
on a familiar subject read faster and more efficiently,
with fewer eye movement regressions, than they did
when reading an equally difficult text on an
unfamiliar subject.
RECHT &LESLIE (1988)

Compared the effects of prior knowledge of baseball

on good and poor middle school readers’ comprehension
of a written description of a half inning in a baseball
game.

WILLINGHAM (2006)

suggests that this improved performance occurred

because readers familiar with baseball were able to chunk
action in the text when dealing with them in working
memory.
 EFFECT OF INCONSISTENT
OR
INCORRECT PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

• Prior knowledge is not

always helpful in
comprehension; in some
cases prior knowledge can
interfere with text
comprehension.
EXAMPLE

• LIPSON(1982) found that third graders were better at comprehending and

remembering information in leveled science and social science texts when
that information either agreed with their prior knowledge, as measured by
a pretest, or was entirely new. When a pretest showed that they had
incorrect knowledge, both average and poor readers usually failed to
comprehend contradictory information in the text.

ALVERMANN, SMITH, & READANCE (1985)

• Found that having sixth graders deliberately activate prior knowledge

prior to reading science passages about snakes and sunlight turned out to
be a disadvantages when the passage contained counterintuitive
information, such as “IN space, the sun’s heat cannot even roast a potato”.
KENDEOU & VAN DEN BROEK (2007)

• Found even worst result in a study of undergraduates’ comprehension

of physics texts. In their study, undergraduates holding common
misconceptions about physics not only comprehended texts containing
correct explanations less well, they rarely even noticed the
contradictions between the texts and their own(incorrect) prior
knowledge, unless the texts were structured to specifically describe and
refute their incorrect beliefs.
 • Because prior knowledge so
EFFECTS OF strongly affects reading
comprehension, it can make
PRIOR assessing general reading
comprehension skill much more
KNOWLEDGE difficult.
ON READING • Most test makers today try hard to
COMPREHENSION avoid using questions that d raw on
prior knowledge that is likely to
ASSESSMENT differ greatly among various groups
of people.
JOHNSTON (1984)

• Found that comprehension of a sample test passage for Illinois eighth graders on the
Civil War, a topic from the eighth-grade curriculum with which obviously none of them had
personal experience, was still affected by individual differences in prior vocabulary
knowledge.

KEENAN & BETJEMANN (2006)

• Found that children could correctly answer most questions on the popular Gray Oral
Reading Test (GORT) at a rate higher than chance thus demonstrating that they were
drawing, at least in part, on prior knowledge to answer this question.

• In two studies of undergraduate reading, SHAPIRO (2004) tried two strategies often used in
research to counteract possible effects of prior knowledge on comprehension: use of text on
imaginary topics or texts in areas where readers are likely to be novices.
• In her first experiment, she had students read a passage about the history of a
completely fictional country, yet she found that students’ general domain
knowledge in history still significantly affected their comprehension scores.

• In the second experiment, she had undergraduates who had just enrolled in a course
on cognition read advanced texts on human memory, and found again that, even
though all participants were novices in the field, differences in prior knowledge
significantly predicted comprehension results.

• On the conclusion, SHAPIRO suggest that studies of comprehension should always

include a measure of prior knowledge used as a covariate in analyzing any results.

• JOHNSON, applying similar thinking to education, suggest that school and teachers
must use caution in interpreting or acting upon any students’ score on a single
reading comprehension test, since that score maybe strongly influenced by whether
the student had accurate prior knowledge of specific passage topic.
 Thank you
for
listening and watching