Factors associated with good comprehension: actively constructing meaning
Readers and listeners go beyond the processing of individual words and sentences to understand text: they construct a meaning-based representation of the situation described in the text. Three text-level language skills that aid this process are:- integration and inference
- comprehension monitoring
- knowledge and use of text structure.
These have been referred to as text-level skills because they specifically aid the combination of meanings between sentences and the construction of the mental model.
Integration and inference
Working out which pronouns relate to which people is a good example of the need to integrate meanings across sentences to make full sense of a text. Sometimes such links may be cued by a synonym or category exemplar, e.g. 'She finished the drink. The orange juice was refreshingly cold.' Integration and inference making are important for good text comprehension, but it is important to note that we do not make all possible inferences from a text. In the example above, we do not need to infer the size or colour of the glass, or the age of the person drinking. However, it is necessary to infer that the orange juice was the drink that the female character drank, in order to link the meanings of the two sentences. Both adults and children are sensitive to this distinction: this type of necessary inference is made more often than the optional, more elaborative inferences by children aged 6 to 15 years, as well as by adult readers.
Barnes, M. A., Dennis, M. and Haefele-Kalvaitis, J. (1996) ‘The effects of knowledge availability and knowledge accessibility on coherence and elaborative inferencing in children from six to fifteen years of age’, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 61, pp. 216–241.
Comprehension monitoring
Good comprehenders are sensitive to how well they have understood something – they monitor their comprehension and notice when something in the text does not make sense. The National Curriculum refers to this explicitly, for example when it says that pupils should be taught to 'understand what they read by: checking that the book makes sense to them, discussing their understanding and exploring the meaning of words in context' (Years 3 and 4).
The skill of comprehension monitoring is commonly assessed by researchers when they ask children to read or listen to texts that have anomalies inserted in them. In the following example, the sentences containing the anomalous information are marked by asterisks:
'Gorillas are clever animals that live together in groups in Africa. *Gorillas sleep on the ground on a bed of leaves and they like to eat different types of fruit. They are shy and gentle and they hardly ever fight with each other. Gorillas have flat noses and a very poor sense of smell but their eyesight is very good. They move about the ground on their hands and feet. *Gorillas sleep up in trees and they often build a shelter out of leaves above them to keep the rain out.'
Children with poor reading comprehension are less likely to spot these obvious inconsistencies in text, particularly when the two anomalous pieces of information are separated by more than a single sentence, as in the example above. This is probably because good comprehenders strive to integrate each new piece of information into the mental model they are constructing. When they do so, they will spot that information cannot be easily integrated into the current text representation. Monitoring the adequacy of our understanding may also be important for learning: questioning whether facts fit with what we already know is crucial in building and refining our store of general knowledge about the world.
Oakhill, J., Hartt, J. and Samols, D. (2005) ‘Levels of comprehension monitoring and working memory in good and poor comprehenders’, Reading and Writing, 18, pp. 657–713.
Cornoldi, C. and Oakhill, J. (1996) Reading Comprehension Difficulties: Processes and Intervention, p. 79. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Text genre
Stories and informational texts have overarching structures that readers and listeners can use to help guide their construction of the mental model. For example, typical narratives have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the introductory sentences typically set the scene by introducing key characters and critical information which provide a foundation for the story (and the mental model). Informational texts also have recognisable structures, although these can follow a variety of formats, for example sequential versus compare and contrast. These structures, and the relation between information in the text, is often signalled by specific words, for example in contrast, different from, on the other hand for compare and contrast structures, or because, since, as a result for cause and effect texts.
Knowledge and use of narrative structure predict pre-readers’ later reading comprehension. Children with poor reading comprehension tell poorly structured stories, which may lack a clear, causally related sequence of events, and they often miss out key details and events.
Kendeou, P., van den Broek, P., White, M. and Lynch, J. S. (2009) ‘Predicting reading comprehension in early elementary school: the independent contributions of oral language and decoding skills’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 101, pp. 765–778.
These higher-level skills together predict reading comprehension development and are poor in children with poor reading comprehension.
Oakhill, J. and Cain, K. (2012) ‘The precursors of reading comprehension and word reading in young readers: Evidence from a four-year longitudinal study’, Scientific Studies of Reading, 16, pp. 91–121.
Cain, K. and Oakhill, J. (2006) ‘Profiles of children with specific reading comprehension difficulties’, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 76, pp. 683–696.
For teachers and school leaders with a special interest in the factors associated with good comprehension, Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension: A handbook by Jane Oakhill, Kate Cain and Carsten Elbro (Routledge, 2014) gives a clear overview of this aspect of teaching comprehension.