Develop a Literature review Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Develop a Literature review - Essay Example This therefore means that there is a big responsibility for teachers and instructors to impart the art and science of reading and comprehension to students and pupils at all stages of their academic lives. â€Å"Whereas reading is primarily concerned with the decoding the message of a given text, comprehension goes a step further to attempt to understand and apply the information written in the text appropriately† (Ganske & Fisher, 2010). Nation & Angell (2006) make a clear distinction between reading and comprehension. To them, reading seems to be a form of communication but comprehension requires further understanding and clarification. Comprehension involves inferring the intended effects of what is read and identifying and explaining the cases written in the discourse for producing the effects (Finder, 2003). This therefore indicates that the core idea behind reading, is to enable the reader to grasp a message, idea or information put together by the encoder and then take action on it. This is practically the aim of formal communication that most students will apply in the future, when they begin to work. It is therefore essential that these students get a good ability to understand the basics of decoding messages and understanding them fully in the wider sense. The central role and the formative nature of secondary education can never be ignored. Thus, it is essential that secondary education focuses on some important factors that can enable an individual to grasp and understand the concept of reading and comprehension. However, this effort of teachers to achieve this is sometimes frustrated by some challenges that makes it difficult to teach students how to read, analyse and understand texts. Challenges in Teaching Reading & Comprehension in Secondary Students In practice, there are several difficulties that stand in the way of teaching students to read and understand text. Snowman et al (2010) identify that inherent disabilities and challenges in students, like down syndrome, physical disabilities like hearing, sight and speech impairments as well as cultural differences and language barriers can stand in the way of a child who attempts to read and decode messages. This therefore makes it difficult for the teacher to impart the art and science of reading to children with such inherent challenges and problems. Also, poor comprehension can result from poor teaching methods used to team students about reading and comprehension at the primary and lower grades of education. â€Å"Comprehension difficulties often go unnoticed by teachers [in primary schools] and are discovered later by specialist professionals [at the secondary levels]† (Nation & Angell, 2006). This implies that some of the problems and challenges that the secondary school teacher faces in teaching students to comprehend what they read is carried forward from their primary education. This is linked to the fact that most primary curricula are focused on simp ly decoding and not comprehension (Ellis & McCartey, 2009). However, in spite of the focus of primary education being on decoding, Ricketts et al (2008) state that the problem with reading challenges carried forward from the primary school is in two folds: the decoding problem and the comprehension problem. Aside these issues that are brought into the secondary school classroom, there are some other challenges that are