A Conceptual Framework from Word

3Reading comprehension is widely agreed to be not one, but many things. At the least, it is agreed to entail cognitive processes that operate on many dif-ferent kinds of knowledge to achieve many different kinds of reading tasks. Emerging from the apparent complexity, however, is a central idea: Compre-hension occurs as the reader builds one or more mental representations of a text message (e.g., Kintsch & Rawson, 2005). Among these representations, an accurate model of the situation described by the text (Van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983) is the product of successful deep comprehension. A COMPONENTIAL FRAMEWORK FOR COMPREHENSION The comprehension processes that bring about these mental representations occur at multiple levels across units of language: word-level (lexical pro-cesses), sentence-level (syntactic processes), and text-level. Across these levels, processes of word identification, parsing, referential mapping, and inference all contribute, interacting with the reader’s conceptual knowledge to produce a situation model of the text. Figure 1.1 represents the components of comprehension in a way that is probably more orderly than how they ex-ist in reality. Even so, the framework is useful for providing a freeze-frame view, necessary to address issues of assessments in any way short of tools that could capture the dynamics of real-time processing. Figure 1.1 includes two major classes of processes along with linguistic and conceptual knowledge sources. The processes involve: (1) the identification of words and (2) the engagement of language-processing mechanisms that assemble these words into messages. These processes provide contextually appropriate word meanings, parse word strings into constituents, and provid