There are four levels of reading comprehension. These are literal, interpretive, critical, and creative comprehension.
1. Literal Comprehension
This is the most elementary level of comprehension. It involves getting the primary or direct literal meaning of a word, idea, or sentence in context. In literal comprehension, the reader does not need to go outside the text for the given or required information. For instance, the five W’s—who, what, where, when, and which can be asked in literal comprehension. The cognitive demands on the reader regarding literal comprehension are not exerting. This is because the reader does not need to draw from his or her previous experiences; the information required can be effortlessly extracted from the text. Literal comprehension is more or less bottom/top reading. The message or meaning is transmitted from the text to the reader’s brain, which accepts and regurgitates it without modification.
2. Interpretive Comprehension
This is a much higher or deeper level of comprehension than literal comprehension. At this level, the reader uses the information in the text and his or her background experience to impose meaning on that of the text. Interpretive comprehension, unlike literal comprehension, is top/bottom reading. Here, the reader uses his or her background or previous experiences to interpret the meaning of the text. Interpretive comprehension, therefore, involves getting deeper meanings, anticipatory meanings, and drawing inferences from the text. It also includes making generalizations, detecting and identifying purpose, reasoning from cause to effect, making comparisons, and recognizing significance. Interpretive comprehension demands academic thinking skills: analyzing, comparing, categorizing, classifying, problem-solving, etc. Students must be carefully and adequately taught interpretive skills to ensure high performance in comprehending written texts. One of the reasons why candidates in terminal exams such as those by the West African Examination Council (WAEC) and the National Examination Council (NECO) never perform well in comprehension tasks is that they are never taught interpretive comprehension.
3. Critical Comprehension
This level of comprehension is much higher than the interpretive level. At this level, the reader, based on his or her universe of experience, passes value judgments on the text he or she is reading. At this level, the reader can determine whether a statement is factual or non-factual. Only the reader who has a yardstick or means of verification can determine if a statement is true or false. At the critical level, the reader should be able to make value statements on the entire work. For instance, the reader can determine whether the text is effective, ineffective, or a pacesetter. To do this, the reader must be quite familiar with other texts. Based on other texts and the content of the text, the reader can then determine whether it is effective. Thus, when it comes to critical comprehension, the reader asserts himself or herself and evaluates the text based on his or her experiences and background.
4. Creative Comprehension
Creative comprehension is cognitive. It is as demanding as interpretive and critical comprehension. It is a step ahead of critical comprehension. While critical comprehension rests on evaluating a text, creative comprehension takes the evaluation further. It connects reading with writing. The reader collects additional information, plans, and develops a new text in response to some aspects of the text he or she has read. In some cases, it is in response to the entire text. Thus, in creative comprehension, the reader is piqued to respond to what he or she has read. The response could result in summary writing, outlining, note-making, journal entries, or a blown-up text responding to what has been read.
Cognitive Strategies
Activating, inferring, questioning, monitoring-clarifying, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing cognitive strategies are essential tools in the hands of an effective reader, just as the stethoscope, kidney dish, sphygmomanometer, cut-down set, Cheatle forceps in a jar, and stainless bowl are essential tools that a nurse needs to be effective in service. An effective reader cannot do without cognitive strategies.
1. The Activating Strategy
Students generally do not comprehend texts because they do not use their background, previous, and even current experiences when they read. They approach the texts they read as visitors from a strange planet. therefore, they do not want to impose any meaning on them. They want to read it as it is and not muddle its contents. There is also a cultural tone to it. Because they are brought up to revere property that does not belong to them, they see the text before them as someone else’s property. In order not to mutilate or distort the contents of the text, they read them over and over again to internalize them and regurgitate comprehensively their original contents.
Students need to change this attitude, which most manifest when they read. They need to know that their previous background and current experiences are as important as the experiences or contents of the text before them. One way they can do this is by learning how to use the activating cognitive strategy to process texts. There are many things that they can use to activate their previous experiences and hook onto the experiences in the text. One of them is to Predict, Locate, Add, and Note (PLAN). We’ll be illustrating how to use PLAN below;
The “P” element of PLAN is called Predict. Before students read a text, they should predict or guess what the structure and message will be. They should look at the title, the subheadings, and some of the graphics and tables in the text. They should skim the essential parts of the text. Such parts are usually topics that are put in boldface or italics. Let them also skim the text’s graphics, pictures, and illustrations. In that way, they would have a bird’s-eye view of the entire text. They should search their memory after skimming. Based on what they have seen in the text, they can guess what it is all about. Their guess may be right or wrong; it does not matter. When they get into reading the text, they can adjust their guess or prediction. They should, of course, base their predictions or guesses on their previous experiences and the types of features they have seen in the text. The next step they should take is to attempt a diagrammatic representation of the text. They activate their memory and prepare their mind to comprehend the text when they read. Again, their diagrammatic representation may be wrong. They will eventually correct it when they get to read the text.
The second element of the activity is “L.” “L” stands for Locate. They should read the text after the prediction. As they read it, they should note those aspects of the text that are interesting, unfamiliar, and difficult to comprehend. They should mark them and note their pages or location in the text. The marked portions will focus on using their previous experience in the third element of PLAN.
The third element of the activity is “A.” “A” stands for Add. During this activity, the student must intensively search for his or her background and previous experience. The student must connect and associate those marked areas in the text with his or her previous experience. For instance, the student must try to recall where he or she has learned, read, heard, or made contact with those marked areas. The student should comment regarding how those marked text portions relate to his or her previous background and current experience.
When the student uses previous experience and consciously connects it with what he or she encounters in the text, he or she is using the activating cognitive strategy. Later, when we come to the summarizing strategy, we shall illustrate how to use PLAN’s “N” element.
2. The Inferring Strategy
When effective authors write, they leave some things unsaid. They expect the reader to fill in the gaps. They expect the reader to read their minds or infer the unsaid meaning or message. Inference is “information activated during reading but not actually stated in the text” (van den Broek 1994: 556). Inferring meaning from a text is a very active process. It demands putting together and reconciling the following sources of information:
- The message or the meaning of the text.
- The implied or unwritten aspects of the message are central to its comprehension.
- The reader’s background experience arises from previous learning.
- The reader’s personal experience.
Thus, the power to infer is enhanced if a student, through extensive reading, has a repertoire of experience from which he or she can draw. If the student has problem-solving and inquiry skills that make him or her a sharp and careful observer of phenomena, and if he or she records the experiences acquired to be reviewed and reflected on later, his or her inferring ability will be enhanced. Usually, when an active and experienced reader processes a text, inference pops up in the mind of the reader through:
- What might happen later in the text is predicted based on what they have read.
- As a conclusion regarding the expository text’s concept, proposition, or principle.
- It is a brand-new idea that combines the reader’s prior knowledge with what they have extracted from the text (McEwan 2004: 35).
3. The Monitoring-Clarifying Cognitive Strategy
When a student has used the activating and inferring strategies effectively and has richly drawn from his/her background and previous experience, s/he still has the task of reading the text. S/he must construct, make, negotiate, and reconstruct meaning if s/he is to optimally and maximally comprehend the text. At this stage, s/he will need a monitoring-clarifying strategy to reconstruct his/her meaning.
Monitoring and clarifying are different aspects of the same strategy. During monitoring, the student uses the language cues in the text to make sense of what s/he reads. The phonic, graphic, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic cues signal different kinds of meaning. The student must have used them at one time or another. Monitoring enables him/her to think about what s/he is reading and what s/he has read. S/he evaluates the reading process and can conclude whether s/he is making progress. Monitoring will enable the student to identify words, phrases, clauses, and sentences that block and frustrate reading. Through monitoring, the student can decide whether to re-read some aspects of the text or all of the text. It will also enable the student to determine if s/he has to consult some other sources to have a clearer or better idea of the blocks that hinder comprehension, frustrate, or delay reading. In monitoring, the student draws from his/her previous experiences. This time, it is a special kind of experience: it is the experience of how the language system operates. Thus, the reader with a good command of the language’s grammar, phonology, graphology, lexis, and semantics will be in a better position to draw from the language cues than one who does not have a good command of them. That is why it is imperative that at our school system’s primary and secondary levels, we equip students with enough linguistic and communicative competence to enhance their processing of the diverse texts they will contend with when they enter tertiary institutions.
The monitoring strategy is not restricted to the understanding and use of language cues. The student can also use self-questioning devices to monitor whether or not s/he is progressing. For instance, s/he can ask the following questions to monitor what s/he is reading:
– Do I understand what I read?
– Have I attained the objectives I set for myself before reading this text?
– Should I change my reading speed to achieve my objectives?
– Should I consult other reference sources to enhance my background experience?
– What is the tone of the text?
– What is the author’s style?
The above questions will undoubtedly help the student monitor how s/he reads the text. While monitoring enables the student to think and reflect on the text, clarifying enables the student to fix the blocks that s/he encounters in processing the text. Clarifying draws from the language cues in the text to fix the block.
4. The Questioning Strategy
It must be stressed that authors are not infallible. The fact that something is in print does not necessarily make it right. It is, therefore, important that the student does not swallow hook, line, and sinker whatever s/he sees in print. Therefore, the student must question every piece of information to ascertain its authenticity. Often, some authors do not consider the background experience or even the language competence of their readers. They write without clarifying issues. They also write, leaving a lot of gaps in their text. One way the student can comprehend what such authors mean is to use questioning to construct and reconstruct the meaning in the text. The art of self-questioning while reading a text is a very useful cognitive strategy the student must have. The art of questioning while one reads is multi-faceted. It uses activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, and other cognitive strategies. Unless students are properly taught, they may never master the strategy of questioning information while reading.
One activity that can help the student develop the skill of questioning information sources is QtA. QtA stands for Questioning the Author. The student must take advantage of what an author provides and fill in the gaps regarding what is needed but which the author does not provide. Thus, the student must utilize his/her activating, inferring, and monitoring-clarifying strategies to understand who the author is, what the author has accomplished, and what the author should have accomplished but did not. In so doing, the student could focus on the areas where the author has made wrong assumptions about what the student knows, thereby writing without explaining such portions. At this stage, the student could focus on the author’s queries. Author queries are questions that are not specifically about the contents of the text but about the author’s intention. Such questions could include:
i. What is the theme of the text?
ii. What is the author’s goal?
iii. Has the author achieved his/her goal?
iv. Are the author’s explanations clear?
Beck, I. et al., (1997) view of Qt A
– What is the author trying to say?
– What is the author’s message?
– What is the author talking about?
– Does the author explain clearly?
– Does this follow with what the author told us before?
– How does this connect with what the author told us before?
– What does the author assume we already know?
– Why do you think the author gives the information now?
When students develop the strategy of questioning authors and information sources, they are less likely to be frustrated by difficult texts. This is because they would have realized that it is the responsibility of an author to make his/her text comprehensible. When an author fails to do so, students will not be put off; they will be able to address challenges as they read. They would become deeply engaged in their reading as they use questions to address the gaps in their texts.
5. The Searching-Selecting Strategy
Search-selecting is an essential workplace and academic skill. It involves ‘finding text, browsing through information, or collecting resources for the purposes of answering questions, solving problems, or gathering information’ (Guthrie & Kirsch, 1987: 220). Therefore, it is vital for survival and academic accomplishment. Unfortunately, it is seldom taught by teachers who generally feel that librarians must teach it.
Like all the other strategies described, searching-selecting does not come by chance. It has to be taught, and so has to be learned. The need to teach the searching-selecting strategy becomes important when considering the avalanche of information on the Internet. Internet information sites are multifarious. One can easily get lost when surfing the Internet if one is not adequately trained to search for the information needed to complete a project or assignment. Besides, most of the information on the Internet is not edited. It is emotional, half-truths and cannot be confirmed or corroborated. Unless one has a discerning mind and is properly trained to search and select, one may choose the chaff for the wheat and be completely misguided. Dreher’s (2002) model, which the teacher can use to enhance the ability to search-select, has the following elements:
– Formulate a goal or plan of action.
– Select appropriate categories of documents or text for inspection.
– Extract relevant information from the imported categories.
– Integrate extracted information with prior knowledge.
– Monitor the completeness of the answer, recycling through the component processes until the task is complete.
Thus, in the searching-selecting strategy, the student must make up his/her mind regarding what s/he has decided to look for. Having made up his/her mind, s/he should reflect on what s/he is looking for. Then, s/he should prospect for the information by digging into library catalogs or the Internet to identify the information sources s/he wants to consult. The next step after finding the information sources is for him/her to review the book, journal, magazine, websites, and other resources. S/he must, at this time, decide which of the resources s/he wants to use. In other words, s/he should pick out the most important information source. Finally, the student should put the information together and answer the questions or write the project s/he has set out to accomplish.
6. Visualising-Organising Strategy
It is one thing to comprehend what one has read effectively. It is, however, another thing to store it in such a form that it can be easily retrieved for use if and when the information is needed. Visualizing is one strategy that students must have to effectively store what they have comprehended in a form that can be easily retrieved for later use. Students must know how to use graphic organizers to store what they have comprehended. Students indeed see diverse kinds of graphic organizers in the books they read. It is also true that graphic organizers enable them to comprehend the text better and more effectively than without organizers. However, it is true that unless students can generate their graphic organizers and use them to understand areas they have comprehended, they cannot retain what they have stored and comprehended for long.
Conclusion
There is abundant research evidence to support why students should be taught the cognitive strategy of using graphic organizers to store what they comprehend when they read. Pearson & Fielding (1991: 87) contend that ‘any systematic attention to clues that reveal how authors attempt to relate ideas to another or any systematic attempt to structure or impose structure upon a text, especially in some sort of visual representation of the relationship among key ideas, facilitates
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