Pondering Comprehension

While reading Gill’s article The Comprehension Matrix, I realized I had never thought about how the text layout affects my reading comprehension.  Gill says there are “three major factors that affect comprehension: the reader, the text, and the situation.”  She goes on to say the spacing and white areas on a page can affect comprehension.  Now that I have thought about this, I completely understand and agree with what she is saying. I can remember reading books and if I turned the page and saw a really long paragraph with no spaces, I would get discouraged.  If I turned the page and saw short paragraphs or short and quick dialog that allowed for lots of while space on the page, I got excited to read it. 

I also really like the idea of during reading activities.  I had a teacher once that told me a story about when she was a young reader.  She said she despised reading so much that when it came time to read silently she would simply sit there, count to one hundred and then turn the page as if she had just taken the time to read it.  She said looking back it probably would have been easier to just read the book but she hated doing what the teacher asked.  I believe that taking part in during reading activities would fix this problem. I like the idea of having the students make predictions about the story based simply of the title and cover. Then have them read a small section and at the end of each section, ask the students if their predictions were correct. I think this would solve the problem of children pretending to read!