What Works by Michael Pressley (2000).

Comprehension Instruction: What Works by Michael Pressley (2000).

Reading is central to learning in school, in the workplace and in everyday life. This article talks about skills that increase student understanding of what they read. Reading is often thought of as a hierarchy of skills from processing of individual letters and their associated sounds to word recognition to text-processing competencies (Pressley, 2000). Fluid articulation is required for skill comprehension. It began with the sounding out and recognition of individual words to the understanding of sentences in paragraphs or texts. There are three skills that students need to improve reading comprehension decoding, vocabulary, and knowledge skills. Teachers should encourage students to build world knowledge through reading, and also to the relationship between what they know to what they read.

Decoding is the ability to decipher printed words by recovering the spoken word that a printed word represents. It involves phonemic awareness which is the understanding of letter sounds correspondences. In order for student to read proficiently they must be able to decode with accuracy and fluency. Students cannot understand a text if they cannot read the words. The child’s ability to sound out a word does not mean that the word will be understood as the child reads. Vocabulary is knowledge of words and word meanings. There are two types of vocabulary oral and print. Oral vocabularies are words that we recognize and use in listening and speaking. Print vocabularies are words that we use in reading and writing. One counterargument to this advice to teach vocabulary is that children learn vocabulary incidentally that is, they learn the meanings of many words by experiencing those words in the actual world and in text worlds, without explicit instruction (Stanovich, 1986; Sternberg, 1987). World knowledge is another content that can influence reading comprehension. Students that have knowledge about a topic tend to understand it better than another with low prior knowledge. One way to accomplish this is to encourage extensive reading of high-quality, information rich texts by young readers (Stanovich & Cunningham, 1993).

Good readers are aware of why they are reading a text. They make predictions about the upcoming text. Active comprehension strategies include imagining, questioning, connecting, clarifying and summarizing most important information. This article gave some good points that up coming teachers