Literacy Professional Learning Resource – Key Concepts

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VELS level 1 & 2 – Comprehension (Brown, Palincscar,Pinnell, Pressley)

Comprehension is a multi-dimensional process that involves factors related to the reader, the text, and the activity.

Research-Based Practices in Early Reading Series: A focus on comprehension (www.prel.org/products/re_/re_focuscomp.pdf) – this document provides an overview of issues relating to comprehension in young readers.

Foundational Skills and Processes of comprehension:

• word recognition and decoding
• vocabulary knowledge
• higher order reading processes
• social and cultural influences
• self efficacy, self management and direction
• factors related to the text
• text genre and structure
• language features
• purposes for reading and comprehension
• about the reader.

Comprehension: cause and effect

This section explores how a student’s knowledge of vocabulary, how they read and why they read can effect comprehension.

Vocabulary knowledge

The powerful relationship between comprehension and vocabulary knowledge is one of the most consistent findings in reading research. Research shows both that good readers generally have large vocabularies (Anderson and Freebody1981; Nagy, Anderson, & Herman, 1987) and that improving students’ vocabularies also can improve their reading comprehension (Beck, Perfetti and McKeown 1982; McKeown, Beck, Omanson and Pople 1985).

The relationship works this way: To get meaning from what they read, students need a great many words in their vocabularies as well as the ability to use various word-learning strategies to establish the meanings of words they do not know when they encounter them in print. Students who lack adequate vocabularies or effective word-learning strategies necessarily struggle to achieve comprehension.

Higher order reading processes

Good readers bring to each reading activity a great deal of general world knowledge (Anderson and Pearson 1984; Hirsch 2003).

As they read, good readers activate their network of existing knowledge, or schema, as they encounter topics or words in a text that relate in some way to that network.

Once activated, schemas trigger connections to other schemas, thus supporting comprehension. Logically, then, the larger a reader’s network of schemas the greater the likelihood that he or she will read with comprehension. In addition, good readers engage in metacognition as they read.

Cognition refers to mental functions such as remembering, focusing attention, and processing information. Metacognition refers to readers’ awareness of their cognition: their thinking about their thinking.

For example, before they read, good readers use their knowledge of the text subject to think about and set purposes and expectations for their reading. As they read, they think about whether they are understanding the text and, if not, what they can do to improve understanding. After reading, they may think about what they read, whether they enjoyed or learned something from it, and whether their reading gave them ideas of information they might use in the future (Palincsar and Brown 1984; Paris, Lipson and Wixson 1983; Paris, Wasik, and Turner 1991; Pressley 2000).

Purposes for reading and comprehension

Away from school, students’ purposes for personal reading might include reading to learn how to put together a game or toy, reading to find out how something works, or just reading to enjoy language and ideas.

In school, however, the purposes for reading are set most often by teachers. These purposes may require students to read to answer questions, to write a book report, or to prepare for a test. When a teacher-imposed purpose is unclear to students, or when they cannot see the relevance of an activity, their comprehension can suffer.

The same is true when teacher-set purposes are insensitive to or incompatible with the understandings and expectations that students bring to the activity. This is a particular concern in cases in which students’ social and cultural backgrounds differ from those of their teachers (RAND Reading Study Group 2002).

School-related reading activities are most productive when teachers make the purposes for the activities clear and relevant to what students are doing or will need to do, such as reading for writing (Horowitz 1994) or reading for presentation (Bransford, Brown and Cocking 1999).

Related materials

Previous key concept - Learning to read (Clay, Luke and Freebody, Munro)

Next key concept - Systematic teaching of phonics (Wray)

Teaching strategy - Comprehension strategies (Reading aloud Opportunities to read Identifying story elements Answering teacher questions)

Assessment - Concepts about Print (part of the Observation Survey - Clay)