COMPREHENDING THE READING ACT: EXPERIMENTING FOR A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF THE WRITTEN MATERIAL

Abstract

Comprehending the reading act has been a great experiment in some areas such as linguistics, education, neuro-linguistics, psychology and psycholinguistics. Reading comprehension is the aptitude to process text, understand its significance, and to assimilate it with what the reader already knows. It is the level of understanding of a fragment of text, of a message. An individual's skill to comprehend text is predisposed by their aptitudes and their capability to process information. How does comprehending the reading act converted into an object of study of these different areas and some theoretical conceptions that guide the different models of reading will be the main theme of this research. Most of individuals develop comprehension abilities through education or instruction. Some apprehend them by direct understandings. Proficient reading is related on the ability to identify words and expressions rapidly and fluently. Reading comprehension includes two levels of processing, shallow (low-level) processing and deep (high-level) processing. Deep processing involves semantic processing, which occurs when we encrypt the significance of a word or expression and relate it to comparable, simpler, fully known words or expressions. Shallow processing involves structural and phonemic recognition and processing of sentence and word structure (Richard K. Wagner; Christopher Schatschneider; Caroline Phythian-Sence, 2009). Comprehension strategy training is problematic for many educators as well as for scholars, particularly because the firsts were not taught this way and because it is a demanding task for the seconds; there is a clear evidence of a direct correlation that fluency and comprehension lead to better understanding of the written material, across all ages.