Describe the component skills involved in reading comprehension. Reading and understanding written text involves multiple processes. Proficiency in reading comprehension comes from the successful interaction of different cognitive skills. Before one can apply the component skills of reading comprehension, one must first possess sufficient language and problem solving skills, and good memory. Language skills involve lexical recognition of words in the text, semantic understanding of their meaning, and syntactic knowledge of how those words can be correctly combined and chained together in a sentence.
Problem solving skills require making inferences and learning from the text.
This provides the referential framework that facilitates understanding. Next, one must integrate this knowledge with the novel information being processed. Making connections to existing network structures increases retention and comprehension. Third, one uses the network connections in this cognitive framework and the information in the text to make inferences about meaning. Finally, one must recall the newly-processed information from memory to solidify the learning and encoding process.