Comprehension Instruction

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[Tutor 's Name]

[Class]

08 February 2008

What Makes Sense Now , What Might Make Sense Soon

One cannot deny the fact that reading is the critical human skill Teaching to read cannot be effective without proper understanding evaluation , and development of comprehension strategies . Comprehension in reading has been the subject of numerous researches , but there are still significant theoretical and practical gaps in understanding how teachers may improve reading comprehension

What makes sense now will not necessarily make sense soon . The development of comprehension approaches

will surely change the structure of reading and comprehension in future . Everything will depend on the effectiveness of the current comprehension research . Pressley states that "given that there are some types of instruction that improve comprehension , it might just be sensible to do all of them . No one however , has ever done an experiment to explore what happens when reaching is full of comprehension-enhancing approaches versus absent of them . The problem is that there are too many contradictory researches and too many confusing research results which prevent creation of a single solid comprehension theoretical (and practical ) framework

I believe that there are certain aspects in comprehension development which are relevant now and which will be relevant soon . I am confident that reading comprehension needs to be taught explicitly , starting early and continuing through each grade level . If we want to solve our educational problems , we need to look at understanding what we read These ideas are also expressed by Kirby . Pressley supports my beliefs saying that "such instruction will affect 5- to 8-year-olds dramatically , in the short term and perhaps lead to development of better comprehension skills over the long period . Simultaneously several researchers have concentrated on the issues of text structure as related to the effectiveness of comprehension skills development . It appears that the awareness of students of the physical text structure and presentation facilitates students ' abilities to comprehend the text and to identify the most important information (Dickson , Simmons Kameenui . However , we can hardly connect these results to the ideas in Collins ' research "younger and less mature readers do not concentrate on textual features because they are not aware of the impact text structures have on learning . As a result , what makes sense now will hardly make sense soon . We currently try to apply various incompatible and insufficiently researched approaches to improving comprehension skills among students . Combination of such approaches will hardly prove to be effective in future . It is evident that both text 's physical structure and early comprehension development are critical for the success of learning , but is the combination of these two techniques scientifically justified

Effective reading is actually the scaffolding of background knowledge vocabulary , phonics , and reading strategies to understand text (Comprehension Strategies . Yet , there is no definite understanding of the role of background knowledge , and how it could be properly utilized to increase the effectiveness of teaching comprehension techniques These aspects will hardly make sense in future in the way they make sense now . It...