CRITICAL READING STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE READING COMPREHENSION

CRITICAL READING STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE READING COMPREHENSION

Suraiyo Bazarbayeva

Master’s student, Khoja Akhmet Yassawi International Kazakh-Turkish University

Kazakhstan, Turkestan

ABSTRACT

Reading is one of the most significant skills that every student must acquire, as it helps them develop their communication and comprehension skills. It is one of the most complex cognitive processes that require students’ comprehension, decoding, memorization, and motivation as well. Students usually forget the significance of these processes, and therefore, they lack reading comprehension. However, teachers should always strive to find the best ways that help students to overcome the obstacles of reading.

This article describes what critical reading skills are and the importance of developing them. Challenges that students face during reading are presented, and the reasons for their occurrence are also identified. The author presents a step-by-step approach to developing critical reading and comprehension and explains why they are important in reading comprehension.

Keywords: critical reading, reading comprehension, reading strategies, paraphrasing.

Introduction: Reading is an essential skill that every teacher should teach their students, as it improves the functioning of their brain, sharpens their memory, improves theory of mind, and increases their knowledge and vocabulary as well. Reading comprehension is the process of drawing meaning from the text that has been read [1, p. 230]. It contributes to the active mastery of the means of foreign language communication in both oral and written forms. Being able to speak a foreign language directly depends on the number and quality of the texts read in that language. To improve reading skills we can use a variety of reading strategies and activities. However, reading strategies work well when they are constantly practiced [2, p. 14].

The main issue in teaching reading in the educational process is the ability to capture students’ interest in the context of the reading passage. Obviously, without reading it is impossible to develop students’ communication skills. Reading is one of the most important skills that enable individuals to obtain information and quality knowledge. It is worth mentioning that teaching students to read critically is one of the most challenging tasks in educational process. Critical reading skills, like critical thinking skills, require the ability to critically examine and reflect on information, to understand and remember the information read, to be able to conduct critical analyzes and discussions about it, and to be able to determine whether the information is true or false. Thus, critical reading is an effective skill that students need both inside and outside of the classroom [3, p. 366].

Challenges in Reading

Reading can be challenging especially when the reading materials are unfamiliar. However, comprehension is more challenging. Actually, a reader can understand words from a reading passage separately, but it can be challenging to connect them to make a meaning [4, p. 3]. We constantly use articles, informational texts, simple and short texts about advertisements or announcements and also literary texts. However, when reading, students usually face with difficulties in understanding the text, pronouncing and spelling the certain words; as a result they have a lack of reading and communicative competence.

Before teaching our students to read, we had to focus on when and how to use different types of reading, and analyze whether they struggle with it, or not. In order to effectively teach students to read and build a successful communicative competence, we firstly need to assess our students’ level. That is, we have to define whether they are in entry level or higher, what are the strengths and weaknesses of our students. Teachers should keep in mind that reading should neither be too hard, nor too easy. Another words, there is no any hope to expect a better result from our students, if they do not understand the reading, because it is too difficult, and  there will be absolutely no benefit from it. So, it is important to access our students’ level by taking a placement test first, and then, by giving short reading passages of varying degrees to check their reading comprehension.

It is clear that many students read the text very quickly, and they might be able to answer a few true/false, or multiple choice questions. However, if we ask them a deeper question that requires thought and opinion, or to think critically, they have no idea how to answer it.

Moreover, most of the students do not connect to the reading, that is, we give them a text to read, explain it to them, and do some activities, but they are not able to see how it is related to their lives at all. This means that our students do not read enough, and it is probably connected to the fact that they do not enjoy reading.

As we can see form this vicious cycle of the poor reader, students experience frustration, and when they frustrated, they are going to read less. Reading less causes them to have less vocabulary, and less vocabulary leads to low comprehension.

Picture 1. Vicious Cycle of the Poor Reader

So, they just continue to go around in this cycle, because they are unable to get out of the vicious cycle of the Poor Reader.

In the process of reading students usually forget that they use a variety of cognitive processes, and forget about using many different approaches they have to use at the same time. This is why, students struggle to read or even hate reading.

When a student reads, it is likely that he or she will probably look at vocabulary, think about pronunciation and pay attention to the general idea and what is being set in it. For many students it is sometimes impossible to understand what they have just read. Therefore they try to attempt to read two or more times, but it still seems challenging for them. This means that reading is engaging and incredibly complex cognitive process that demands:

• decoding - is a key skill for learning to read that involves using letter-sound relationships to pronounce written words;
• memorization - is the process of committing something to memory;
• identification – is the capability to find, report, change, or delete specific data without ambiguity;
• comprehension – is the understanding and interpretation of what is read;
• motivation – is the process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behaviors. 

Reading effectively means, reading in a way that helps students understand, evaluate, and reflect on written texts, and it is a critical skill needed. Therefore, teachers should get students out of the vicious cycle of the poor reader, and help them to get into the virtuous cycle of the good reader.

Picture 2. Virtuous Cycle of the Good Reader

We can see from this cycle that good readers are those who enjoy reading. If they enjoy reading, they read more, develop more vocabulary, and the more vocabulary they developed, the higher comprehension they have. So, they will continue to read more and get better at reading.

Effective Reading Strategies

It has found that teaching effective reading strategies is a fundamental stage of developing students’ reading comprehension. However, students usually have difficulty understanding the reading, because many teachers do not have a foundation of reading strategies for teaching children [5, p. 709]. Therefore, we prepared some reading strategies to help students learn and use them while reading. Throughout English lessons, we analyzed different texts in depth, using skimming and scanning techniques to get the basic idea, as well as to find specific words and phrases from the text. We also worked on anticipation strategy, in case students did not find any answers to the questions, and surprisingly, students made so many predictions to find the right answers [6, p. 46]. Some students were even able to predict the correct answer. This was an excellent job to the first attempt, rather than just sitting and doing nothing.

It is obvious that many students stop reading, because they do not understand words in a passage instead of continuing the reading process. Therefore, as we indicated above, we had to pre teach our students to become more confident at finding linking and key words, translating difficult vocabulary, and teach them to be critical in paraphrasing, and understanding the meaning or context as well.

We sometimes forget that reading has three main difficulties that lead to have a lack of reading comprehension, which includes paraphrasing, meaning and context. If students successfully overcome these difficulties, they will not definitely have any problem during the reading.

We have to teach the students how to paraphrase, because plagiarism is huge that the students do all the time without noticing that they are doing it. Instead of expressing ideas in their own words and sentences, they pretty much copy what has already written in the textbooks, because they do not understand the text, or do not have capability how to rephrase sentences into their own words.

In fact, paraphrasing strategy is divided into three groups, such as synonyms, changing words forms and changing grammar structures. So, we have to teach our students how to use these strategies, and to be able to see that some sentences in a reading passage might somehow be paraphrased like this, and when they go through a text, they might encounter at least one of them.

Moving on, we have another two strategies, that is, meaning and context. We all know that our students always attempt to answer questions about a reading passage with the help of key words, and this is actually good. However, overusing key words may not always help them, because key words do not always work, but key meaning works. That is why, we as a teacher should teach our students how to find the key meaning of a passage.

Our next strategy is context. Students mostly struggle with it, as they usually pay attention to separate words, rather than the context. Indeed, this strategy will definitely be effective one, especially when you work with long texts, because, sometimes it is unlikely that students will understand all the words in a reading passage, and it is truly time consuming. Therefore, we should explain to our students that they must look at the context overall, not those separate words, and it is absolutely fine not to know one hundred percent of words from the text.

So, let’s see how we have helped our students acquire pretty much knowledge about how paraphrasing works, and how easily and contextually paraphrase each sentence, or at least to be able to understand paraphrased sentences, without looking at separate words.

When we paraphrase, we might module it sentence by sentence, or we may also give our students a couple of sentences to paraphrase, but we should not give them the whole passage to do so. However, when we ask our students to write an essay, or to do some report, we should not get and check plagiarized papers, because we know that they have this skill and enough confidence to do this activity in the classroom. 

Here, we want to pay your attention to these sentences that we can give you as an example of how paraphrasing works in different stages. So, the first one here is the synonyms.

Example sentence: Sally agreed that the tips she was given were practical.

In fact, this might looks like a very simple sentence, but there is a word “practical” that students may not understand its meaning. So, we have substituted this word with another one, namely we used its synonym. Besides, there is used passive voice, which we think, might also be difficult to understand.

Paraphrased sentence: Sally received useful tips from a friend.

This one is pretty understandable, because we have changed some of these words with simple English to help you understand how sentences can be paraphrased by using synonyms.

The next step is changing word forms:

Example sentence: Privatization has failed on several continents very quickly.

By giving this example, we want to draw your attention to nouns, verbs and adjectives, as it is known for us as changing specific word forms that we think difficult or have a variety of usages.

Paraphrased sentence: Many continents saw the failure of privatization in the months after its beginning.

Here, we have substituted the verb “fail” with the noun “failure”, because we know that both of these words has the same meaning. Even though we have changed their forms, and it is totally fine.

Another structure is changing grammar structures:

Example sentence: In the US, the AI progress was slower than anticipated by the majority of scientists.

Paraphrased sentence: Progress in the area of AI in the US was not as rapid as expected by many in science.

In this sentence we focus on to change the grammar structure, namely “was slower than anticipated” to “was not as rapid as expected”, but again the meaning of these sentences is not different. This means that by using this structure we can vary as many sentences as possible, as long as they have the same meaning.

Another structure we have is meaning or context, and now, we want to show you how we can apply these structures in reading. So, there is an article taken from the authentic source, named “The Economist”

Example from the article: “Tesla’s greatest asset is Mr Musk, a visionary spearheading rocket trips to Mars, neuroscience, grid-scale batteries and other transformational technologies. Investing in Tesla is a bet on his genius for turning the future into dollars”(Taken from “The Economist”).

So, when our students first read this text, they might say: “What?”,“What does this mean?”Indeed, it is absolutely fine for students not to understand this text, because it is truly difficult for the first glance. However, when we closely look at it, we can see how many unnecessary words have been used to trick the reader, as well as to complicate the meaning, and this definitely makes the reading much more difficult.

Therefore, the following example shows how to break it down sentence by sentence.

The key meaning: Musk is a visionary and he innovates. Investors believe in his genius (future inventions), when they invest money.

So, as you can see from this example, we have easily omitted all these fancy words, such as, neuroscience, grid-scale batteries and other transformational technologies, as they are not so necessary to translate, and they are just supporting data, that give some more details. Therefore, they do not really change the meaning of a sentence, and they are specifically there to challenge the reader. That is why we think the main idea of this text is Mr. Musk himself, not all his innovations that we have omitted, and investors only believes in his genius, not his innovations, and because of his genius they invest money.

Apart from these issues, students also encounter with summarizing difficulties. Obviously, when it comes to summarize, the same thing happens as paraphrasing, meaning and context, because it is hard for students as well. Most of the time students are asked to summarize the reading, but they end up taking some sentences from the passage, meaning, some sentences from the beginning, some in the middle, and some in the end. So, we need to find out some effective ways of summarizing to help struggling readers understand how to conclude the reading passage in their own words.

Despite of having a lot of difficulties in reading and understanding the passage, there are also various effective strategies to help struggling readers:

• pre-reading strategy (to connect reading to prior knowledge, use graphic organizers, and do previewing vocabulary);
• during-reading strategy (using annotation symbols for marking up a text, thinking out loud );
• post-reading strategy (to encourage critical thinking).

The first pre-reading activity we should do is to connect reading to prior knowledge. As we said before, a lot of students are not interested in what they are reading, and they do not know how to connect their knowledge to what they just have read. Therefore, we should use different activities to activate their prior knowledge. The second activity that is required to do more is to use graphic organizers. This is clear that visuals, such as pictures and graphs, are definitely helpful for struggling readers to learn and organize information. The third one is known for us as previewing vocabulary activity, and as we all know, here we should teach some unknown and difficult words beforehand. It should be noted that a lack of pre – reading activities makes it harder for students to read, and causes frustration.

While doing during–reading activities, we want to focus our students’ attention on one aspect of the reading at a time. Another words, we may be focus their attention on vocabulary and pronunciation, or may be grammar and comprehension, but we cannot do all of them at the same time. A lack of during – reading activities means students are saying couple of words about a text, but they are not really learning a lot. So, we need to focus their attention on reading.

Post-reading activities help us reinforce the lesson objectives, and they also allow us to expand upon the reading with more tasks and skills development. A lack of post – reading activities means students may quickly forget what was learned. For instance, if teacher teaches students something right now, they know one hundred percent of what the teacher have just told them. But then, as time goes by, they start to forget, and a memory simply starts to fade, and after a while they will easily forget half of what they have learned about. However, some information that students learned by pictures is quite memorable. So, by doing that kind of activities we can refresh the knowledge and students do not forget all of the knowledge they have acquired. 

The next strategy is to encourage students to think critically. We want students to think deeply about what they read. It is not just to fill the blank and answer some “true/false” and “multiple choice” questions, but actually discuss and think about what questions and thoughts they have about the reading.

So, here we have just listed out some possible reading strategies that might somehow be helpful for students to read in English.

Conclusion: Overall, reading is one of the most essential skills that is always needed to acquire. We as teachers should teach our students to read fluently and easily understand a reading passage. No matter how big the obstacle in teaching to read an authentic text is, we always need to find the right approach to solve it. It is obvious that not all students can read and understand a passage simultaneously, as it is complex cognitive process that demands some special skills, such as decoding, comprehension, memorization and motivation, so as to fully comprehend it. Therefore, it is totally fine, if students have difficulties in understanding, remembering, and answering the questions about the reading. As we already said this is due to the lack of reading practice, as well as the students’ lack of interest.  However, we can teach our students by using different activities, and fun games to encourage them to read more in English lessons.

References:

1. Pourhosein Gilakjani A., Sabouri N. B. How can students improve their reading comprehension skill //Journal of Studies in Education. – 2016. – Т. 6. – №. 2. – С. 229.
2. Carter C.E. Mindscapes: Critical reading skills and strategies. – Cengage Learning, 2013.
3. Al Roomy M.A. Investigating the Effects of Critical Reading Skills on Students' Reading Comprehension //Arab World English Journal. – 2022. – Т. 13. – №. 1. – С. 366-381.
4. McNamara D.S. (ed.). Reading comprehension strategies: Theories, interventions, and technologies. – Psychology Press, 2007.
5. Küçükoğlu H. Improving reading skills through effective reading strategies //Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences. – 2013. – Т. 70. – С. 709-714.
6. Banditvilai C. The effectiveness of reading strategies on reading comprehension //International Journal of Social Science and Humanity. – 2020. – Т. 10. – №. 2. – С. 46-50.