Comprehension—what is it?
Text comprehension is making meaning from text. It is the ultimate reason for reading. All of the other areas of reading contribute to comprehension. A tenet of Florida's B.E.S.T. Standards for ELA (adopted February 12, 2020) is that "[c]omprehension develops as students engage with literary and informational text selections that are complex, rich, and meaningful." In their academic careers, students must read and comprehend various informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts with proficiency.
- Text comprehension can be improved by instruction that helps readers use specific comprehension strategies. Those strategies include monitoring comprehension, using graphic and semantic organizers, answering questions, generating questions, recognizing story structure, and summarizing.
- Students can be taught to use comprehension strategies.
- Effective comprehension strategy instruction should be explicit or direct (through direct explanation, modeling, guided practice, and help with application of a strategy).
- Cooperative learning can be an effective comprehension strategy.
- Productive comprehension instruction helps readers use comprehension strategies flexibly and in combination.
- Comprehension strategy instruction can begin in the primary grades. Teachers should emphasize comprehension from the beginning rather than waiting until students have mastered "the basics" of reading.
In this subsection you will read about text comprehension and strategies that increase students' ability to make meaning from text. Read the summary on text comprehension from the publication, Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read.
Required Reading
Learn more about reading and text comprehension at the below links.
http://lincs.ed.gov/publications/html/prfteachers/reading_first1text.html
http://www.k12reader.com/what-is-reading-comprehension/
Text complexity
Text complexity comprises qualitative factors and quantitative factors. The qualities of a text are based on its meaning or purpose, its structure, its clarity, and the knowledge it demands from the reader in order to be understood. Quantitative factors include word length and frequency of word use, sentence length, and text cohesion (Understanding text complexity, 2011). Cohesion derives from whatever holds a sentence or longer units of language together, such as word relationships and linkages resulting from grammatical structure (Morris & Hirst, 1991).
A third factor of text complexity involves determining appropriate texts for particular reading levels and functions. The following link provides greater detail on the qualitative and quantitative factors that make up text complexity, and offers advice on selecting and using complex texts.
https://pdo.ascd.org/LMSCourses/PD11OC132/media/Literacy_HSS_M2_Reading_Complex_Texts.pdf
Note to the reader: The state of Florida adopted the Revised Florida Standards in 2014; these revised standards were replaced by the B.E.S.T. Standards for English Language Arts and Mathematics, adopted on February 12, 2020. While the above link references the Common Core, understanding text complexity is one of the competencies listed in the 25th edition of the Competencies and Skills Required for Teacher Certification in Florida.
Text readability
Text readability is closely related to text comprehension, discussed previously. Readability simply refers to how easy it is for a reader to understand what he or she is reading. Ease of reading depends on the vocabulary, sentence structure, and syntax used by the writer; it also depends on the typography chosen. The link below briefly discusses the concept of text readability and introduces the reader to three instruments for determining readability: the Flesch Reading Ease Test, the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Formula, and the Lexile Framework for Reading.
https://blog.ung.edu/press/measure-readability/
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