What Are the Skills Involved in Reading Comprehension?

What are the skills involved in reading comprehension?

1. What is reading comprehension？
Understanding a written text means extracting the required information from it as efficiently as possible. For example, we apply different reading strategies when looking at a notice board to see if there is an advertisement for a particular type of flat and when carefully reading an article of special interest in a scientific journal. Yet locating the relevant advertisement on the board and understanding the new information contained in the article demonstrates that the reading purpose in each case has been successfully fulfilled. In the first case, a competent reader will quickly reject the irrelevant information and find what he is looking for. In the second case, it is not enough to understand the gist of the text, more detailed comprehension is necessary.

2. Why do we read?
As Chinese students, we have started learning English since the first year we entered the junior school. We used to read articles aloud in the morning standing in the crowded classroom, recite strange passages under the dim lamplight in our bedrooms until night. However, the real goal of learning English is always confusing us. Not until finished the college entrance examination did I realize that I have to think about this troublesome question. Now, I find the most significant aim in learning English is enabling us to have the ability to read articles in magazines and different data written in English. Why do we read? There are two main reasons for reading: reading for pleasure and reading for information(in order to find out something or in order to do something with the information you get). It is called reading comprehension. As far as I am concerned, the first step to improve reading comprehension is to find out the skills involved in it ,then pay attention to them, or we will stay in the gap of English learning and exam-oriented learning forever.

3.The skills involved in reading comprehension
-Understanding conceptual meaning
-Understanding the communicative value of sentences and utterances
-Understanding relations within the sentence
-Understanding relations between the parts of a text through lexical cohesion devices
-Understanding cohesion between parts of a text through grammatical cohesion devices
-Interpreting text by going outside it
-Recognizing indicators in discourse
-Identifying the main point or important information in a piece of discourse
-Distinguishing the main idea from supporting details
-Extracting salient points to summarize the text, an idea etc.
-Selective extraction of relevant point from a text
-Basic reference skills
-Skimming
-Scanning to locate specifically required information
-Transco ding information to diagrammatic display

4.Effects of Vocabulary Training on Reading Comprehension
In the abstract of Karen Mezynski’s Issues Concerning the Acquisition of Knowledge said such a paragraph :A strong psychometric relationship has consistently been reported between measures of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. This finding could imply that one way to improve children’s reading performance is to increase their vocabulary. Eight studies are reviewed that attempted to do this. Although all eight studies reported increases in students’ word knowledge, many failed to facilitate reading comprehension. Methodological and instructional differences across studies are examined in an attempt to account for the different results. The major goal of this paper is to discuss methodological and theoretical issues that arise from a review of the studies and to suggest implications for future research.
A survey of the literature was made to determine the skills involved in reading comprehension that are deemed most important by authorities. Multiple-choice test items were constructed to measure each of nine skills thus identified as basic. The correlations of the nine skill scores were factored, each skill being weighted in the initial matrix roughly in proportion to its importance in reading comprehension, as judged by authorities. The principal components were rather readily interpretable in terms of the initial variables. Individual scores in components I and II are sufficiently reliable to warrant their use for practical purposes, and useful measures of other components could be provided by constructing the required number of additional items. The results also indicate need for workbooks to aid in improving students ' use of basic reading skills. The study provides more detailed information regarding the skills measured by the Cooperative Reading Comprehension Tests than has heretofore been provided regarding the skills actually measured by any other widely used reading test. Statistical techniques for estimating the reliability coefficients of individual scores in principal-axes components, for determining whether component variances are greater than would be yielded by chance, and for calculating the significance of the differences between successive component variances are illustrated.

3. Conclusion
As the above article said, these skills have intimate relations with vocabulary. We often heard that vocabulary is the blood of English learners. Though it is complex to find all methods to promote our reading comprehension, widen the vocabulary is what we can do to get closer to our achievement.

References
[1] Karen Mezynski.Issues Concerning the Acquisition of Knowledge. Vanderbilt University,1988

[2] Françoise Grellet. Developing reading skills. Cambridge University Press, 1981

[3]李俊.《论词汇的深度和广度与阅读理解的关系》.《外语期刊》2003年第二期

References: [1] Karen Mezynski.Issues Concerning the Acquisition of Knowledge. Vanderbilt University,1988 [2] Françoise Grellet. Developing reading skills. Cambridge University Press, 1981 [3]李俊.《论词汇的深度和广度与阅读理解的关系》.《外语期刊》2003年第二期