Week 8: Factors that Influence Comprehension

There are multiple factors that influence how and if meaning is made from a text. 

Factor 1: Background Knowledge

One that significantly impacts how a reader interprets a text is prior knowledge. I thought the story in Table 7.1, Pat, was about a prisoner trying to escape. My background knowledge word like escape, charge, penalty, severe, failure, and success led me to that conclusion. I agreed with the children from the study immediately that assumed that Pat was a male. After seeing the other options of a pet and wrestler from Table 7.2, I could see how others came to those conclusions.

Other types of knowledge that affect comprehension are content, process, and disciplinary knowledges. I did not possess content knowledge (knowledge of and experiences with events, objects, and situations) of having my own pet, so I did not think that Pat was a pet or had anything to do with pets. Another type of knowledge at work here was process knowledge (knowledge of processes, procedures or strategies).  I used my process knowledge of reading to employ strategies such as predicting, rereading, and inferencing to try to figure what situation Pat was in. When content and process knowledge interact, disciplinary knowledge (knowledge about how that knowledge was created, used, and evaluated) is born. In reading comprehension, disciplinary knowledge seems to be similar to metacognition—thinking about our thinking.

Factor 2: Cultural Experiences

Cultural experiences also influence comprehension. When the reader and the author share cultural background or experiences, the reader gains more meaning from the text, can accurately retell more information, and can read the text more quickly. Even when presented with information that is similar to our cultural background yet contains some differences, we tend to focus on what is the same and assimilate the new information to our schemata.

With Table 7.3, The Procedure, Kucer suggested that sometimes writers don’t give readers enough information to activate their prior knowledge. In this case, there is no way for the reader to relate the text to himself/herself. I was surprised that my guess that Table 7.3 was about laundry was correct. (Maybe this is because even with only two people living in my house, there seems to be a never-ending heap of dirty clothes.). Though there were a few clues to help me draw this conclusion, the use of more content-specific words would have helped me activate my prior knowledge. Research also suggests the use of teaching with metaphors to help students connect what they know to what they don’t know. The teacher’s example in Figure 7.2 with the word “terrace” is a great model.

Factor 3: Situational Nature of Comprehension

The situational nature of comprehension was best displayed in the Table 7.7. On my first read, I thought perhaps the boys were just ditching school until I got to the end. The leaky roof stopped me in my tracks. Rereading the text the following two more times with different lenses emphasized that the purpose for reading determines what details a reader attends to. In addition, the context determines if the reader maintains a high or low text integrity.

Factor 4: Transactional and Dynamic Aspects

The transactional and dynamic aspects of comprehension were seen in the activity using Table 7.8. I read the Table 7.8, and then worked on other homework for an hour before completing the recall activity. An hour later, there were many omissions, substitutions, additions, rearrangements, and a summary (Table 7.9) of what I had read. I transformed what I read into a new event, a simpler version, with less specific numbers and descriptive language. Comprehension is dynamic and transactional because it is based on interactions between the text and the person reading it. No two people comprehend a text in the exact same way even though both people have fully comprehended the text. In order to have shared meaning, there must be shared background knowledge and cross-checking of what the reader is understanding. See Figure 7.2 for a visual representation of this concept.

Table 7.10 Instructional Implications 

(Number in parenthesis match the number of principle in the table) 

Using texts that match readers’ world knowledge will help students when trying to recall information or events (1). Before having students read a passage or participate in a read aloud, teachers should set the purpose for reading and listening. This will help students attend to the most important information, thus letting them know what is and is not incidental information (5). Another strategy that should be emphasized to aid in comprehension is looking back at the text to answer questions or to check oneself. Because readers tend to alter/confuse information from the passage to make it fit into their background knowledge (3, 4) and readers can’t distinguish between ideas that are stated and not stated in the text (6), this will ensure they are gaining the intended meaning. Helping students focus on the structures of narrative and expository texts will help them find patterns in texts, and therefore find the necessary information to recall (2).

Factor 5: Vocabulary

Word knowledge and vocabulary play a huge role in comprehension. The exercises involving Table 7.4 and Table 7.5 were extremely challenging. I skimmed the word list in Table 7.4 and thought I was familiar enough with most of those words. After reading Table 7.5, I realized that my surface level of knowledge of those words weren’t enough to help me understand the statistical paragraph. Vocabulary instruction is more than dictionary definitions in isolation; semantics is crucial to word meanings as they relate to the text , which was seen in the Text Complexity article last week.

Similarities and Differences in Vocabulary between Kucer and S&H: 

Kucer and S&H have very similar ideas about vocabulary selection and instruction. Though some of the terminology is different, their principles are very close. Both researchers are highly committed to the idea that increased vocabulary knowledge also increases reading comprehension.

Both authors recognize that vocabulary depth is the extent or amount to which a concept/word is developed. Vocabulary depth refers to robust knowledge of the word’s various shades of meaning. They both share the concept of having a limited knowledge of many words (surface level), so students can see how they are related. Kucer refers to this as vocabulary width while S&H refers to this concept as vocabulary breadth.

Thematic units and inquiry units are seen by both books as the best way to help students experience concepts and create a depth of knowledge about a topic and its vocabulary. These units also help students create connections between words by making mental concept maps.

Both Kucer and S&H believe in the merits of multimedia to support word learning. Kucer posits that one way to aid rich word knowledge is to use hypermedia or hypertext reading. Hypermedia is the use of various mediums and modalities to show what a word means, such as print, visual, and sounds. As the Text Complexity article stated, these various mediums increase the imageability of words, and the mediums can create mental pictures in their minds.

Other commonalities between the two authors were the importance of choosing target words that will be important later on for the student, such as academic vocabulary and content area words. Kucer calls this flexibility.

Reading Process Discussion Questions:

1. Choose one of the tables in Chapter 7 and describe your experience with it. 

2. Look at Figure 7.2 (Kucer pg. 196) and think about the idea that a reader can fully comprehend a text, but that comprehension may be different than another reader. Have you experienced this paradox in life or in the classroom? How do we help students have a shared meaning of a text when it is necessary (formal assessments, state-testing)?