Reading Comprehension Instruction: Effects of Two Types. (2001)

College freshmen with low literacy skills are underprepared to meet the challenges presented to them in the area of reading comprehension. According to Applebee, Langer, and Mullis (1985), beginning undergraduate students have the basic reading skills needed to understand a newspaper, but many of them have difficulty reading and studying college textbooks. By the time most poor readers enter college, their ability to decode words has become automated. What they have difficulty with is understanding the complex nature of expository prose because of the complexity of the written language and their inability to successfully organize and integrate the material (Norris & Hoffman, 1993). Additionally, these individuals have few strategies and poor flexibility when it comes to reading and comprehending expository text. The ability to selfregulate one's thinking and learning has been found to be highly predictive of students' academic success (Pintrich & DeGroot, 1990; Zimmerman & Paulsen, 1995). The current thinking in the teaching of developmental reading is to link a reading course with a credit-bearing, content-area course so that skills may be directly applied to the content course (Stahl, Simpson, & Hayes, 1992). In this type of instruction, students learn specific reading strategies, such as increasing reading efficiency, developing technical vocabulary, and preparing for exams, within the context of actual course work. Although many researchers have found these paired or adjunct courses to be successful (Adams & Mikulecky, 1989; Balajthy, Bacon, & Hasby, 1985; Blanc, DeBuhr, & Martin, 1983; Bullock, Madden, & Harter, 1987; Elliott & Fairbanks, 1986; Stone, 1991), none have focured on the complexity of the text and the difficulties students have integrating textual information within the targeted courses. The ability to read and comprehend text does not solely depend on letter recognition but also on meaning and context. All aspects of language aid the reader in comprehending text (Adams, 1990). These include the following types of information: orthographic, phonologic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and contextual. Processing units from each of these types of information are integrated into patterns of recognized words, concepts, and syntactic structures (Norris, 1998; Weaver, 1994). All units of information are connected to every other unit either directly or indirectly. Meaning is derived from the text as all elements are processed simultaneously. That is, the different elements can jointly contribute to the meaning of a word or groups of words (Seidenberg, 1992). The presentation of visual stimuli (i.e., letters, words, and sentences) causes the reader to begin both perceptual and conceptual processing (Norris, 1998). Perceptual processors receive sensory input and include visual images, such as individual letters; groups of letters and general structures of sentences; paragraphs and passages; and phonological units, phonemic units, orthographic units, and word forms. Conceptual processors attach meaning to the perceptual units through the following: lexicon, concepts, prior knowledge, discourse structure, and context. The vast amount of expository text required of college students consumes the majority of their class preparation time. Nowhere is expository text more important, nor more demanding, than at this level (Hiebert, Englert, & Brennan, 1983). College texts contain words that have erudite meanings and are highly specialized to a particular field of study. Studies have shown that when students come across an unknown word in a text, they spend little time searching the text for context cues or looking up the word's meaning in a dictionary (Nist & Olejnik, 1995). Syntax is often of a complex nature, with references that may or may not be signaled by words in the text. Concepts are often abstract and present difficulty to poor readers because meaning must be derived from unfamiliar information. …