COMPREHENSION “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” —Dr. Seuss
KEY FINDINGS
> > Comprehending is a dynamic process of meaning making. “ Comprehension is always the product of two elements: what we knew before we read and what we are able to assimilate or accommodate to enhance and expand on that knowledge” (Goodman, Fries, and Strauss, 2016). > > “The brain actually constructs a mental text—we call it the reader’s text—based on the published text. Remember what you are seeing as you read is not meaning but patterns of ink. You as the reader must construct from them a meaningful text and make sense of it. It is this reader’s text that the reader comprehends” (Goodman, Fries, and Strauss, 2016). > > The more we read, the more we know—and, therefore, the more expansive our capacity to comprehend (Kintsch, 2004). > > Comprehension is the “ability to understand the meaning of what is said, or read, as well as its intent” (Cunningham and Zibulsky, 2014). > > Proficient reading—which entails high-level comprehension—is a complex process, involving an intricate orchestration of multiple skills, strategies, and conceptual understandings also known as systems of strategic actions (Fountas and Pinnell, 2017). > > Text comprehension requires the involvement of many different components, relying upon many different kinds of information and yielding complex mental representations … However, text comprehension is not simply the sum of the activity of these various processes, but arises from their coordinated operation as a system” (Kintsch and Rawson, 2005). > > Each reader builds a system for processing texts that begins with early reading behaviors and becomes a network of strategic activities for reading increasingly complex texts. Reading is thinking: within the text, about the text, and beyond the text (Fountas and Pinnell, 2017).
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COMPREHENSION
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