READING COMPREHENSION

(Ahmad ali posted at 9 February 2014)

What is reading comprehension?

Many attempts have been made to define reading. It is generally agreed that reading involves two broad aspects:

(A)   Mechanical, activity which consists of decoding of deciphering the marks (Words, Sentences, Paragraph) on the page, the brain receiving signal from the eye. There is basically a visual task on this mechanical level.

(B)   There is a cognitive task, that of the interpreting the visual information, through which the reader seeks to read for meaning and the purpose of the writer.

The first activity involves visual perception and the second is chiefly dependent upon experience of the reader. Thus it can be concluded that reading comprehension involves “visual mechanical skills of the recognition, remembering the meaning of words, integrating grammatical and semantic clues, and relating this to the reader’s own general knowledge and the knowledge of the subject being read”. This definition of reading comprehension leads us to the ‘reading’ process that can be described as:

         1                                                     2                                                  3

   Print                                                                      Brain

  Visual                        Eye                 Non visual

Information                                        information

                                                          (sensory store)

This process shows the importance of eye-movement in the reading comprehension. 

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