Chapter 3: Understanding What We Read

You can read several books but not have the schema or background to comprehend what you are reading but also you can be reading for tests and be taught how to bypass the comprehension and go straight for the literal answers to the questions you are given. I know this from personal experience. When it came to taking exams like the TAAKs (as it was called) I scored low on the reading comprehension, but not low enough to fail. My mother always asked me why when I read so many books that I had a hard time with the reading comprehension part of the exam, it was mostly because much of the time I had to exert little to no effort in reading the passages and answering the very straight forward questions that did not require my full comprehension of the text. Also sometimes I didn’t have the full understanding as I went into taking a test such as the TAAKs to get the meaning that they wanted me to receive out of it. As teachers we need to give our students relevant and meaningful information before they begin a text, while they are reading it and even afterwards so that during the reading process they have points of reference for certain foreign subjects that they will stumble upon throughout these books. Giving them meaningful information also deepens their understanding of the novel and allows them to form new pathways called schema between things that they did and did not know.

Transactional theory was brought to light in the 1930’s by Louise Rosenblatt. It states that each reader brings his or her own experiences to the books that they read and therefore take something different away from it, and that through an authors choice of words or style can influence the reader in ways that they did not intend. I find this theory to be very true and it also negates the theory that there is only one meaning to a text. You cannot guarantee this because readers do have such a varied background that taking away the same thing among them is almost impossible unless you tell them what you want them to get out of it. Rosenblatt also makes a distinction between 2 different types of reading. These two types are aesthetic and efferent reading. Aesthetic reading is done purely for pleasure while efferent has a purpose behind it such as reading a textbook for a class. According to Rosenblatt most reading is a combination of both efferent and aesthetic reading. Most of the reading that I do for pure fun is more efferent than aesthetic but for me it is a healthy dose of both. This is another lesson that is important in reading. Encouraging kids to read something that actually allows them to get something out of it instead of reading that requires little to no thought about the characters or plot.

One huge problem I find with reading comprehension is because due to standardized testing comprehension is bypassed for passing the test. Because passing a standard test is so much more important than understanding what you are reading right? WRONG. As teachers we have to prepare our students for life after graduation and not teach to the test like so many are guilty of today. We have to give them the tools for comprehension and give them the independence that if they don’t understand something that they have read to go and do some research on it. We have to hold ourselves to higher standards so that our students set a higher standard. This to me is the goal of education is to raise the bar.