Abstract
To investigate the capacity for self-monitoring reading comprehension in Brazilian Elementary School students. Fifty-three Elementary students in the 5th and 9th grades from two Public Schools in the city of São Paulo were assessed. They were selected based on their oral reading rate and grouped according to their performance in reading comprehension in the following categories: Group with best comprehension: students with adequate rate and accuracy, without difficulties in reading comprehension; Group with worst comprehension: students with adequate rate and accuracy but with difficulties in reading comprehension. Two narrative texts followed by eight questions to assess reading comprehension were presented. Two sentences and two words were replaced by ungrammatical elements and pseudo-words. Under the condition of spontaneous monitoring, students read the text aloud and answered the questions. The analysis considered the calculation of hesitation, self-correction, repetitions and mistakes. Under the condition of directed monitoring, students were instructed to read the text, either aloud or silently, after being told that certain parts of the text could not make sense, and they were oriented to underline such parts. The analysis was carried out by counting of underlined items. The comparisons were made with the Mann-Whitney test. A difference was observed between the groups only at the sentence level among the 9th grade schoolchildren under the spontaneous monitoring and among the 5th grade schoolchildren under directed monitoring. Students with worst comprehension had a poorer performance to monitor the presence of ungrammatical sentences than their peers with best comprehension.
Highlights
Efficient reading comprehension requires monitoring the content read and the strategies used for reading, until the understanding of the text is reached
In order to evaluate the ability of self-monitoring reading comprehension, a team composed of 6 speech therapists and 1 linguist developed the protocol that consisted of 4 narrative texts - 2 for each school year, and 8 literal and inference questions for each text
The hesitations observed throughout the test with the ninth grade, the experiment for identification of ungrammatical sentences, indicated a difference between the best and worst reading comprehension groups (Table 1)
Summary
Efficient reading comprehension requires monitoring the content read and the strategies used for reading, until the understanding of the text is reached. The role of self-monitoring and evaluation of the acquired knowledge stands out. These executive functions[1,2] must be directed during reading in order to achieve the very goal of this action: to grasp the meaning or a coherent representation of what is proposed in the text. The ability to define strategies to improve comprehension can distinguish good from poor readers[3,6,7,8,9]. The experiment was based on procedures described in the literature to distinguish good from poor readers
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