The research conducted over the last three decades has changed our view of reading as a mere process of decoding. Grabe describes reading as an … active process of comprehending [where] students need to be taught strategies to read more efficiently (e.g., guess from context, define expectations, make inferences about the text, skim ahead, etc. (1991, p. 377). This means that one does not read all the sentences in the same way, but one relies on a number of ‘cues’ to get an idea of what kind of sentence or an explanation that is likely to follow. Moreover, Krashen’s (1981) hypotheses on language acquisition have greatly influenced the research and practice in reading comprehension, and in particular the effect of “the Schema Theory.” Specific attention is paid to interactive approaches to reading, which argue that reading comprehension is a combination of identification and interpretation skills. Grabe (1991) lists the five most important areas of current research which are still prominent: “schema theory, language skills and automaticity, vocabulary development, comprehension strategy training, and reading-writing relations” (p. 375). The paper aims at discussing in brief the tenets of reading comprehension, the cognitive tasks involved in reading as well as the various activities teachers use in teaching reading comprehension. |
