Effective readers engage in several strategies which result in comprehension of text. Typical behaviour in print media includes:
- Activating background knowledge-
- Setting a purpose
- Visualizing – seeing images in the mind’s eye
- Summarizing
- Questioning , predicting and adjusting thinkng
- Monitoring – thinking aloud, using ‘fix up’ strategies
- Connecting – personal connections (text to self), text to text and text to world
- Determining importance – capturing big ideas
- Drawing inferences- predicting and confirming
- Evaluating- making judgments about the significance and authenticity of information
- Synthesizing-generating ideas from their knowledge
These strategies work in tandem in order for comprehension to occur. Used continuously, they become second nature. Today’s readers are so bombarded and practically overwhelmed by information that one wonders if they actually spend time engaging in the aforementioned activities when reading digital text.
The literature suggests that students activate prior knowledge, plan, predict, evaluate, monitor and repair whenever a navigational choice is made.
May I conjecture that readers in their formative years of reading may not fully develop the aforementioned skills in a world that is technologically and digitally driven if they are so immersed without specific early instruction in developing these requisite skills?
Students must be taught how print and online texts are different in order to be able to apply the strategies they know and to adapt new ones for online learning.
Reference:
Tompkins, G. (2010). Literacy for the 21st century: A Balanced Approach. (5th ed). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Roxy
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned that students should understand the differences in online text and traditional print. I was reading an article by Alice Homing. She argued that both texts require similar processes. In other words, one does not need different cognitive or visual processing to read either text. Nonetheless, you are right in that different strategies would definitely be needed for the two types of texts. For one, online text is much more interactive than the traditional print. The article is available at http://www.readingmatrix.com/articles/horning/article2.pdf
While the process are similar, the mere fact that online text is hypreactive suggests that the reader will read the page unconventionally in order to derive comprehension.
ReplyDeleteI think that the internet provides a different text format, different purposes for reading and different ways of interacting with text that can confuse readers who try to engage with traditional texts in the same way. Extracting meaning from both forms require deep critical and strategic thinking but in the rush to search or link to other pages this may not be occuring online.