COMPREHENSION-PROMOTING STRATEGIES: THE SUM OF THE PARTS AND THE WHOLE

Previous research on reading for academic purposes has concentrated on strategies characterizing "the good " and "the poor " reader. Using various methods, researchers have tried to identify sets of strategies, which lead readers to success or failure in academic reading. This approach seems to assume that a given set of strategies may account for success or failure in reading, and that "poor " readers may be trained to adopt "good" reading behavior once they adopt the recommended set of strategies. Contrary to this approach, an in-depth mentalistic study of ten university candidates (Sarig, in press) showed that readers differ in the sets of strategies which allow them to either succeed or fail in high-level reading tasks. Moreover, other findings from this study show that damage resulting from comprehension-deterring strategies may cancel out the benefit resulting from comprehension-promoting strategies, and vice versa. Thus, it seems that no particular strategy, or set of strategies, used by the reader can in fact enable us to predict success or failure in the reading task. Several questions arise from these findings; how can we account for the fact that readers may use a series of comprehension-promoting strategies and still not achieve the reading goal? How can readers ensure the gain expected from the comprehension promoting strategies they employ? These questions are addressed and discussed within the framework of the interactive multi-leveled view of the reading process, and in light of the data on the major role corrective, monitoring reading moves play in it. Based on findings arising from the mentalistic study, conditions for optimizing the use of I wish to express my gratitude to Ann L. Brown, Joseph D. Campione and Shoshana Folman for their valuable remarks on the concept developed in this paper. The same article was published in Communication a Cognition. 43 comprehension-promoting strategies and a corrective-interactive view of text processing will be presented