Reading Comprehension Strategies of College Students: Bridging the Gap

Abstract

Reading comprehension is central to student learning and to their learning outcome. Apart from the process of decoding information, reading comprehension depends on the construction of a coherent meaning-based mental representation of the situation described in a text. It is therefore necessary to activate a set of reading comprehension strategies that facilitate the representational construction of a text. Based on a self-reported study of a stratified sample of 400 students drawn from three colleges of education in Ghana, this paper explored teacher trainees’ awareness and use of reading comprehension strategies Teacher trainees displayed an awareness of their cognitive processes during reading and claimed the ability to utilize a multitude of reading strategies to achieve comprehension. The result however contradicts an earlier study which suggests that students have difficulty understanding academic texts. The gap between awareness of and use of comprehension strategies need to be bridged. It is recommended that explicit explanation and modelling will help students to think about their reading processes and make clear what they should be doing, what they were not doing before, or what they are doing wrong. This will build their confidence to use their reported strategic knowledge to enhance their reading efficacy.