Reading Comprehension

Historical Overview of Reading Comprehension

Prior to the mid-1960s, the reading comprehension process was associated with the notion of digging, as if the meaning needed to be extracted from the text. As such, the reader uses various textual features (e.g., contextual clues and displayed images) to locate and dig out this meaning. The focus on instruction was on the accuracy and immediacy of recognizing words and their association with one another; if readers have the skills to immediately identify the intended meaning of words and the relationships of these words within and across sentences, then the readers will be successful in their excavation. Thus, the purpose of reading during this time was to gain an accurate interpretation of a given text.

During the 1970s and 1980s, notions of reading comprehension shifted away from the text-focused, digging out metaphor toward a model of a reader-centric process. Meaning is assumed to be constructed within an individual reader’s mind, and as such, no two readers can interpret a text in the exact same way. Instructional practices during this time emphasized the importance of utilizing prior knowledge for making inferences from texts. That is, using what is explicitly present in texts, readers were encouraged to draw conclusions about a given topic or concept based on their own prior understanding. Furthermore, instruction began to take into account students’ thoughts and feelings about what they are reading rather than solely focusing on learning new information from text.

During the late 1980s through the early 1990s, issues related to context and situation emerged as dominant foci of scholarship on reading comprehension. Literacy research was generally concerned with both cognitive and sociocultural perspectives, and thus reading became known as a social- or community-based practice. With his view that all forms of learning are socially constructed, Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky was a major influence in this social view of reading comprehension. The champion instructional approach as inscribed in literacy research from this period was for teachers and students to engage in negotiations about the intended meaning of a given text. Vygotsky’s theory emphasized that language in use is ideological or political in nature; people use language to persuade or affirm cultural values and principles. Relatedly, texts were viewed as nonneutral entities; thus, students were encouraged to problematize and critically interrogate texts.

...