The ability to summarise a text is regarded an important strategy for successful academic literacy and reading comprehension.
– A Quantitative Study Of Upper-Secondary ESL Students’ Reading Comprehension Abilities In Relation To Reading Strategies, Metacognitive Awareness, and Motivation
Vocabulary depth refers to how well a word is known, including its semantic associates, use in collocations or idioms, and multiple senses of the word
– Measuring knowledge of multiple word meanings in children with English as a first and an additional language, an…
The upper primary, open-ended comprehension component of Paper 2 comprises ten questions worth a total of twenty marks. Students are tested on different question types. Each question type requires a different answering approach. Not all answers would be found directly in the passage. A recent Swedish study is instructive in how students can sharpen their comprehension skills.
At the primary school level, students would need to apply comprehension skills not only in the open-ended comprehension but also in other components with texts beyond the sentence level. Such texts include the vocabulary cloze component in Booklet A of the English Language Use Paper.
Comprehension or the ability to understand what is communicated is a life skill. Meaning can be embedded in a simple, straightforward way or in more complex ways. It is important for students to understand how meaning is embedded in language for them to understand and enjoy texts deeply.
To understand texts deeply, students must be able to understand a word, the sentence it is found in, the paragraph which contains the sentence and the passage which the paragraphs collectively form.
Meaning is not only communicated through what words represent but also through the grammar and structure of texts. It is not true that factual passages are in the present tense and fictional passages are always in the past tense. Recognising how the structure of texts convey meaning is especially important for comprehension cloze passages.
So students must know that texts are compositions (comprising deliberate arrangement of words and paragraphs) to convey meaning. They must pay attention to vocabulary, grammar and structure to understand texts more fully. Vocabulary, grammar and structure would bear collectively on meaning and many times a text might cause a reader to be affected in one way or the other without the reader being aware why. If students appreciate how vocabulary, grammar and structure work together to form meaning, they would, apart from receiving the full meaning present in texts, also be able to write effectively to convey meaning.
There are specific strategies students can use to increase their understanding of texts. Several studies have shown that students who are able to use more strategies and do use them often do better than those who know fewer strategies or use them less.
A Swedish researcher set out to establish how Swedish upper-secondary school students used comprehension strategies. She worked with secondary schools all over Sweden to administer surveys to students. These surveys comprised questions probing students’ use of 24 comprehension strategies, how much they read on their own without having to do so for school and how motivated they were to study English.
She grouped the respondents into those who used strategies often and those who did not use them as much. She then tried to check if those who did use strategies more were more motivated and if they read more. If these assumptions were true, the results could indicate that motivation and a daily reading habit could lead to students using comprehension strategies more.
Research suggests that intrinsic motivation (wanting to do something because it is fulfilling to the one doing it) leads to longer lasting results and behaviour compared to extrinsic motivation (rewards from others). The researcher wanted to know if this was true for the students who took the surveys.
She found the following applied to students who used strategies more regularly. They received positive reinforcement from home when they did well in English. They did their best in every assignment, found challenging English assignments enjoyable and felt happy learning something new in English. They did not give up easily when they did not understand a text. When they did not understand something in texts, they sought help from a variety of places such as online sources and dictionaries.
On the whole though, the study did not suggest definitively that more motivated (intrinsic or otherwise) students used strategies more.
Her findings confirmed that those who read more on their own used strategies more. Slightly less than half of the students who used strategies more read about 4-6 hours a week. She then tried to check the strategy-use habits of those who read more than 6 hours and those who did not read at all. Before we look at what strategies students who read more than 6 hours a week used, we have to get a sense of what reading strategies are.
Strategies are what students can do to handle problems which arise when they are trying to understand texts. Such problems include, losing concentration, difficult words, long sentences and a lack of background knowledge. Each of these problems is faced by everyone at some point in their interactions with texts. Students who recognise these problems when they arise and know how to overcome these problems would be able to successfully understand texts.
The top three strategies used by respondents were trying to get back on track when concentration was lost, paying closer attention to what they were reading and re-reading to gain clarity.
The least used strategies by respondents were, asking themselves questions about the text, highlighting, underlining or circling information in the text (to aid memory) and taking notes to increase understanding.
Many respondents also thought about what they already knew about a topic while they were reading a text on it. This is important to respond to inference questions for which answers would not be found directly in the passage.
What is important to note is that most used strategies are not necessarily the most effective strategies. According to research, the most effective strategies are summarizing, generating questions about texts and making inferences based on prior knowledge.
It was found in this study that even those who read more than 6 hours a week did not use the more effective strategies of summarizing and asking questions about the text. They too, re-read, paid closer attention to words in a text and tried to bring a wandering mind to heel.
Though in primary school, open-ended comprehension exercises comprise 10 questions, it would be useful for students to generate their own questions such as why a character would do something in a story, to be able to answer the 10 given questions well.
To summarize a text, students would need to practise re-telling. Re-telling is when a reader recounts the passage in different (maybe simpler) words, in a very much briefer form. The researcher cited evidence that it would be useful for students to practise summarizing longer sentences into shorter ones before trying to summarize longer chunks of texts.
The story is in the title.
The Brain Dojo
