MONITORING COMPREHENSION AND ITS IMPACT ON THE COMPREHENSION OF THE READING ACT

Abstract

Reading strategies imply intentional mental arrangements in the course of reading process which expand the comprehension of the reading act. Reading strategies are defined by the IES as deliberate efforts by readers to understand or remember what they are reading. At the end, they check their understanding of what they read. They are conscious strategies — collections of steps that good readers use to make sense of material. Monitoring comprehension is a practice in which students control whether they comprehend what they are reading. Proficient readers involve various approaches to think about and monitor their reading. When a metacognitive approach is implied, they continuously adjust their understanding, monitoring the reading speed, considering the difficulty of the material, correcting any potential comprehension problems occurred. The monitoring of the comprehension includes a few steps: a) identifying the point where the difficulty occurs and what causes it, b) identifying what triggered the difficulty, c) identifying the action needed to eliminate it by looking back and forward on the text for possible information (re-read the precedent paragraphs, look up unknowledgeable aspects, gather more information, examine future headlines). This necessitates explicit instruction with appropriate modeling and guided practice; all these approaches contributing to help readers overcome difficulties in comprehension and compensate for weak textual knowledge.