1991 MovingFromTheOldToTheNewReadComp

Subject Headings: Reader, Good Reader, Poor Reader, Passive Reader, Active Reader.

Notes

This article is an attempt to integrate findings from research about comprehension processes, comprehension strategies, and teaching strategies in order to inform instructional practice in reading comprehension. The article begins with a discussion of traditional views about reading and how those views have shaped the current comprehension curriculum in American schools. A view of comprehension based on recent models of the reading process is presented next as a basis for reconceptualizing the comprehension curriculum as a set of five effective comprehension strategies. From research on teaching comes a foundation for establishing a new view of instruction, one that focuses on the negotiation of meaning among students and teachers through teachers’ instructional actions. Instructional recommendations, based on the research synthesized in this article, and questions for future research bring the article to a close.

Reading is a far more complex process than had been envisioned by early reading researchers; above all, it is not a set of skills to be mastered (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1984). In the traditional view, novice readers acquire a set of hierarchically ordered subskills that sequentially build toward comprehension ability. Once the skills have been mastered, readers are viewed as experts who comprehend what they read. In this view, readers are passive recipients of information in the text. Meaning resides in the text itself, and the goal of the reader is to reproduce that meaning.
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The cognitive views of reading present a different view of the reader. The traditional view assumes a passive reader who has mastered a large number of subskills and automatically and routinely applies them to all texts. The cognitive view assumes an active reader who constructs meaning through the integration of existing and new knowledge and the flexible use of strategies to foster, monitor, regulate, and maintain comprehension. The only thing that becomes automated in the newer view is the disposition to adapt strategies to the particular constraints in the act of comprehending a particular text

However, most, if not all, school-based reading requires readers to determine author-based (which is usually thought to be identical to text-based) importance rather than reader-based importance. Good reader/poor reader studies have consistently found that good readers are better able to judge author-based importance than are poor readers (Afflerbach, 1986; Englert & Hiebert, 1984; Johnston & Afflerbach, 1985; Winograd, 1984). Winograd and Bridge (1986) and Afflerbach (1986) found that good readers accomplish this task in three ways. First, good readers use their general world knowledge and domain-specific knowledge to allow access to and evaluation of the content of the text. Second, good readers use their knowledge of author biases, intentions, and goals to help determine importance. Third, good readers use their knowledge of text structure to help them identify and organize information.

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
1991 MovingFromTheOldToTheNewReadComp	Janice A. Dole Gerald G. Duffy Laura R. Roehler P. David Pearson			Moving From the Old to the New: Research on Reading Comprehension Instruction			http://rer.sagepub.com/content/61/2/239	10.3102/00346543061002239