Research on teaching reading comprehension

Abstract

The present paper represents an attempt to address the "state of the art" relative to research on teaching reading comprehension.The reading researcher and practitioner will find the paper a review of what we know about reading comprehension instruction, and a framework for addressing the adequacy and promise of existing and forthcoming lines of inquiry.Two basic questions drive our discussion: With whom, in what situations, and in what ways does teaching improve reading comprehension?How should research in teaching reading comprehension proceed?Our purpose was threefold: (a) Describe the nature and distribution of research in teaching reading comprehension in the context of stated and/or implied instructional goals; (b) consider issues of methodological significance as they emerge; and (c) suggest some reasonable guidelines for future research in accord with rising research interests and alternative approaches to investigation.We have adopted two discussion headings which represent the nature and scope of this research in terms of two fundamental goals for instruction: increasing learning from text and increasing ability to learn from text.The former reviews the large array of studies which examine the efficacy of teacher intervention intended to improve students' ability to understand, recall, or integrate information from specific text passages.The latter addresses those studies whose goal is to improve general and specific reading comprehension abilities which will transfer to students' reading of passages Teaching Reading Comprehension 2 they later encounter on their own.These two discussions then merge in the final section of the paper where we consider future directions for reading comprehension instructional research and guidelines for how that research might or should be conducted, We recognized from the outset that a review which exhausted the literature was neither realistic nor within the bounds of our goals.Instead, we decided that studies cited in the context of our remarks should be selected largely for their representativeness, significance, or promise.And, with respect to research paradigms, an attempt was made to include descriptive studies dealing with theoretical issues of relevance to teaching reading comprehension, empirical studies involving such prototypical methodology as treatment group comparisons, research syntheses of instructional procedures, and discussions relating aspects of pedagogical intuition.To these ends, we believe the present review is comprehensive, INCREASING LEARNING FROM TEXT/PROSE It is the purpose of this section to highlight research which studies instructional intervention as a means to improve students' understanding, recall, and integration of information, stated in or inferable from specific text passages.Our review of such interventions includes prereading activities, guided reading activities and postreading activities.Note that we have drawn a distinction between activities or strategies based upon when and for what purpose intervention takes place.This distinction might be characterized in the following trichotomy: building upon