IMPROVING READING COMPREHENSION COMPETENCIES OF FIRST ENTERING ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDENTS AT HBUs
5.4 READING COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES FOR FIRST ENTERING STUDENTS
questioning, visualisation, summarisation and meta-cognitive strategies. Students must be encouraged to use RCSs when struggling with comprehension so that they are able to aid their understanding.
5.3.4 Meta-cognitive strategy
Students’ ability to use the meta-cognitive strategy by monitoring and regulating their own understanding will eventually enhance their comprehension of a particular text.
This implies that in addition to the use of cognitive reading strategies, first entering English language students at HBUs must accumulate the skill of regulating and monitoring their own reading comprehension. Most of the students may not be able to think about what they are thinking about. As such, lecturers can familiarise them with this meta-cognitive strategy that leads to effective RC.
5.4 READING COMPREHENSION STRATEGIES FOR FIRST ENTERING STUDENTS
The significance of the use of RCSs to improve and enhance RC should not be overlooked. It is, therefore, important that students are taught these strategies as early
138 META-COGNITIVE STRATEGY
(Thinking about Thinking)
as schooling years because it was revealed that the following RCSs are either not sufficiently taught or not taught at all to first entering students at HBUs. The model of reading comprehension strategies that can be taught and demonstrated by lecturers to first entering students at HBUs is presented in the figure below. Figure 5.2 below depicts how RCSs can be integrated and used simultaneously.
Figure 5.2: The Integrated Model of RCSs for First Entering HBUs Students
5.4.1 The meta-cognitive strategy
This is a strategy that affords students an opportunity to think about what they are doing when they are reading; the students must think about thinking. This will ensure that they develop the ability to exercise control over their comprehension. Additionally, meta-cognitive sub-strategies include planning, monitoring and evaluating one’s thinking process. The meta-cognitive strategy also governs the usage of cognitive
Prior
Knowledge Inferences Predicition visullisation questioning summarisation
139
strategies. The ability to monitor one’s process of comprehension leads to the effective use of the following cognitive strategies:
5.4.2 Prior knowledge
The use of prior knowledge is a very significant strategy. At a university level, the students’ schemata ought to be more advanced. Students should know how using background knowledge (also known as prior knowledge) of a topic they are encountering can aid their understanding. However, they would have to activate the correct background knowledge to bridge the gap between new information at hand and old information that they already possess. Lecturers at HBUs should teach first entering students how to activate the correct schema when reading a particular text to support and increase their comprehension.
5.4.3 Making inferences
First entering students at HBUs can use their background knowledge to make inferences, which refers to the information implied or inferred. Inferences will lead students to discover meanings that are not stated but implied. Students can use their background knowledge and information from the text to draw conclusions. The inferential strategy assists students to infer what the text is about, of which the students can verify as they continue reading and enhance students’ understanding in the process.
5.4.4 Making predictions
Students can also use clues such as titles, pictures, table of contents and key words to make predictions. Lecturers at HBUs can give their first entering students activities of predicting at specific points, through-out the text and then assess the prediction.
Students can also use their prior knowledge to the present subject to make predictions for the purpose of enhancing their understanding and predicting the overall message of the text. What a student predicted can be confirmed or refuted at the end of a reading activity.
140 5.4.5 Self-questioning strategy
Furthermore, first entering students at HBUs should make use of the self-questioning strategy. They must ask themselves questions related to the text, predict the answers to the questions that they have generated, and search for the answers as they read on. The self-questioning strategy assists students with the ability to monitor their own RC. Monitoring one’s comprehension is a very important skill – a process called meta- cognition.
5.4.6 Visualisation
Another effective reading comprehension strategy is drawing a picture of the text – creating mental imagery. This strategy is known as visualisation or visual imagery.
This is the ability to visualise the text so that the students are able to understand it better. First entering students at HBUs must use the capacity of their mind to imagine the message of the text. This strategy can also assist students to accumulate new ideas by connecting ideas and concepts to their past experiences. Lecturers can help students to visualise by asking them to draw or write what comes to their mind when they read the text.
5.4.7 Summarisation
Summarising a text is also a very important skill that students need to learn. It can assist students separate important facts in a text. It thus helps them to eliminate needless information and to remember what they read. Summarisation as a strategy can bring about multiple advantages such as improved writing and vocabulary, and enhanced understanding. Above all, summarisation can lead to permanent learning.
Being able to summarise will ensure that first entering students at HBUs understand texts better and build on their schema, which could be activated during reading to aid their understanding.
In a nutshell, reading comprehension strategies could be more effective when they are used in support of each other than separately. Therefore, lecturers should emphasise this point to their students. What students must be made aware of is that they are not
141
subjected to the use of just one strategy: they can make use of several strategies simultaneously. The use of multiple strategies is more effective than the use of one strategy at a time. In addition, students must be made aware of the fact that there are no RCs that are more important than the other. They are all interrelated and should be used in conjunction for maximum RC effectiveness. For example, they can make use of the prior knowledge strategy to make inferences about the meaning of the text, or they can create questions through prediction and so on.
5.5 GUIDELINES FOR IMPROVING THE READING OF COMPREHENSION