A Cognitive Approach to Factors Influencing Reading Comprehension

Abstract

One of goals of cognitive psychology is to ex plain mental processes that enable human be ings to make sense of environment. In order to achieve this goal psychologist must determine which factors in environment and which factors within mind are involved, and how these factors interact. The same approach used in cognitive psychology is used in this article to explain reading comprehension process. That is, factors external to individual, such as text topic and text structure, and factors internal to individual, such as background experiences and awareness of text structure, are examined in order to ex plain why readers have success or failure in reading ac quisition and comprehension. The cognitive approach has already had an impact on reading. No longer do we think of reading as a one-way street from writer to reader, with reader's task being to render a literal interpretation of text, and, in a classroom situation, come up with the correct answer. Instead, today we think of reading as active con struction of a text's meaning, proceeding from an in teraction between writer and reader. Today we consider that under certain conditions numerous interpretations of a text are possible and, consequently, there may be several correct answers to a question. This larger understanding of reading process has important implications for diagnosing reading prob lems, and these will be discussed following examina tion of external and internal factors.

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