The Factors That Contribute to the Comprehension of Text.

The factors that contribute to the comprehension of text.

Text comprehension is a complex task that involves many different cognitive skills and processes. Understanding and comprehending information from text is a process that is impacted by the reader and the text. The reader must have the ability to understand the meaning of individual words and phrases, or constructing meaning from the text as a whole. This interacts with the prior knowledge, interest, and motivations that the reader brings to the task of reading. The organization of the text or the organization of ideas in a text also affects comprehensions. The text should possess attributes that can assist with reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is an interactive process that involves the reader, and text.

Prior knowledge is one of the most important factors on text comprehension. The reader makes inferences based on prior knowledge when explicit information is not provided. Some readers may draw wrong conclusions or have conflicting interpretations; the person might draw a best plausible concept to put in the active schema structure. The influence of prior knowledge on the comprehension and recall of ideas was illustrated in study by Bransford and Johnson (1973). They asked people to listen to a paragraph and try to comprehend and remember it. Then subjects tried to recall as many ideas as they could. The paragraph was design to consist of abstract, unfamiliar statements.

The results shown that, the participants could only recall 3.6 ideas from a maximum of 14. The ideas from the paragraph made less abstract by showing people an appropriate context, or the visual representations of the paragraph. The context before group showed a picture or visual representation of the paragraph before reading paragraph; the participants shown improvement by recalling 8.0 ideas. While the context after group, shown picture immediately after reading the paragraph, recalled only 3.6 ideas. The results shown that the effect of context was useful, but only if the participants aware of the context before reading the passage.

However, if the paragraph is understandable, then encouragement to change to a new perspective could recall additional ideas that were failed to recall under old perspective. Anderson and Pichert proposed three possible explanations on why changing to new perspective could cause in recall of additional ideas. One idea is that some people might guess ideas that they don’t really remember but consistent with the new perspective. Second alternative is that people did not recall as all they could remember because they thought it was not important for the original perspective. The third possibility is that the new perspective provides them with a plan for searching memory. People might use their knowledge about particular subjects to retrieve new information that was not suggested by the original perspective.

Information could also be falsely recognized when it met our prior knowledge. We might have difficulties distinguishing between what we already read and what we already know.

Both the reader and the organization of the text influence the text comprehensions. To understand the story we need to organize information at two levels. The first level established the global coherence about the main events that occurred throughout the whole story. Global coherence is the major ideas that occur throughout the text. The next level is the local coherence, about the most recent events in the story. Local coherence is the integration of ideas within an immediate context in a text. Global coherence is the term used to describe the integration of ideas across the entire text. Local coherence means that ideas are tied together both within and between sentences. Readers spend more time and expend more cognitive energy trying to make sense. The premise behind both of these models is that the reader must construct meaning at the sentence level in order to make sense of the overall meaning of the text. Our integration of ideas at both the local and global coherence will be greatly influence by how well the author has organized the text.

The story structure determines how the events in the story are organized. At a very general level a story consist of a setting, theme, a plot and resolution. The settings describes times, locations, and major characters. The theme provides the main goals of characters on a narrative. A plot consist of several actions that the main character have to takes to achieve the