Skilled reading requires far more than the ability to decode individual words on a page; it demands the seamless integration of word recognition, vocabulary knowledge, background knowledge, and inferential reasoning in ways that even proficient readers rarely consciously perceive. It appears different between being able to read words and comprehend text. The reading comprehension seems to have used more many skills to interpret information gain from reading than reading the word. There are two elements that make up the process of reading comprehension: vocabulary knowledge and text comprehension. Research drawing on the Simple View of Reading framework suggests that reading comprehension can be modelled as the product of word recognition efficiency and language comprehension ability, meaning that weaknesses in either component will constrain overall reading performance (Castles et al., 2018). To achieve the target of writer, readers have to have many word repositories enough to understand and comprehend the context. Readers may use many different strategies to develop reading comprehension. These include monitoring for understanding, asking and answering the questions during reading, taking notes and draw a linking map of topics, even if paraphrasing in his or her own word about what he or she has read. [7]
The way which was adapted by the majority of readers for reading is vocabulary-bank boosting. That means, the more you know the words, the more you understand the context, or vice versa. You can either increase your vocabulary level by choosing to read the materials those which are beyond your vocabulary level. Whichever methods you choose could make you reminisce about what you have read. Reading to improve vocabulary level is not a short process you may reach in one day, but the long term process which you have to practise until being an excellent reader who has high vocabulary level. People having a large repository of words in their brain are considered as the proficient readers; they could retrieve their bank of vocabulary easily whenever they need [1]. Studies employing eye-tracking technology have demonstrated that readers with larger vocabularies spend significantly less time on individual word processing, freeing cognitive resources for higher-level comprehension and inference-making tasks (Nation, 2022).
Reading Comprehension
How is Reading Comprehension important? It involves the processes of looking at documents and perceiving data from literacy materials, then interpreting this large deal of information. Moreover, these processes maybe entail populating all skills during reading. Unless you use the proper methods for reading, you may not achieve your goals unbeknownst to the materials. Reading comprehension has become particularly central to academic success in higher education settings, where the volume and complexity of required reading increases substantially compared to secondary school, making strategic reading an essential survival skill for college students.
It is noticeable that a person reading in the right way becomes an effective reader. Reading Comprehension can extend the base of knowledge, including assist to understand the exact meanings hidden within. Moreover, readers can access many literacy materials contributing in the Internet. How many ways to approach these sources and how many types they are, will be provided in the following section.
Literacy Materials for Reading
Many a document has its own uniqueness, and so do the degrees of language and styles. Nowadays we can access a lot of information in many ways. The Internet seems to be the most popular source, although books and printings may track back far trendier than in the past. Moreover, magazine, news, textbook, research journals, or even more complicated forms such as codes of Law or contracts, are the choices of materials for reading. On the Internet, some web sites may suggest and grade the level for each reader. Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced readers are the categories most popular level how many classes are classified. You could browse from the library or book store, and if you feel interested in them, buy them. If you cannot afford due to their high price as often found in many textbooks, you may go to the library and borrow them. This method looks fairly cheaper than the former [6].
After availing to the materials for reading, the next obstacle is how the materials are organized and written. Degree of language and style of writing are taken into account and will be discussed in the next section.
Degrees and Varieties of Language
Degree of language is another factor affecting how well readers understand the materials. For this concern, we can classify the degree of language into 2 main categories, as follow;
Informal Language
This style we usually find in many local news reports and magazines or in the materials that are written not so official in regards to the context. Most people today can reach these sources owing to their convenient accessibility. Simply written styles and less complicated word choices are dominant in these materials. Such these materials could capture most interests of people. For language learners, informal texts provide accessible exposure to colloquial expressions, contractions, and idioms that rarely appear in formal instructional materials, thereby broadening their functional lexical range in authentic everyday contexts.
Formal Language
This style we often meet in many rather official documents. Textbooks, Research Journals or Periodicals are the general examples for this type. Moreover, the more formally official documents such as Codes of Laws or Contracts, even if in Official Correspondents are the most formal style. These materials are usually in the matter accounting for official connection.
British English and American English
The varieties of English used today are roughly divided into 2 classes: British English and American English. The difference between them is rather small so that we can assume that it is diminished. However, some aspects still remain between the two of them. Spelling is a distinguishable attribute for this difference. British still conserves the spelling from the influence of French word, whereas American English tries to adapt and spell by how the words are pronounced. Another aspect is the grammatical usage. Subjunctive form of verbs, for example, is differently handled in the two varieties; American English shows a stronger preference for the genuine Present Subjunctive form while British English tends toward equivalent structures using modal verbs. Others include vocabulary, pronunciation and stress patterns [9].
Vocabulary
Vocabulary seems to have effects on reading significantly. The degree of vocabulary designates how readable the materials are. Generally, the vocabulary can be considered in 2 groups as following;
General Words
General words are the words that can mostly find in all materials. These words have general meaning and are often used in daily life. This group hardly causes the difficulty of reading materials. Several dictionaries listed the common words that should be recognized by readers. These words are reconsidered as having correlation to the informal style writing. A working knowledge of the most frequent 2,000 words in English reportedly provides sufficient lexical coverage to read newspaper texts with a reasonable degree of comprehension, illustrating how a targeted vocabulary acquisition strategy can yield practical gains relatively quickly (Nation, 2022).
Academic Words
Academic Word List (AWL) was initially compiled by Averil Coxhead in New Zealand. Academic vocabulary was populated from the 4 main disciplines, i.e. Art, Commerce, Law and Science. As a result, 570 academic words were listed, divided into 10 subclasses dependent on their frequency. The subclass 1 is a group of the most frequent found words, whereas the subclass 10, the rarest. She suggested that these words could help many students answer or write in academic style better whichever majors they attend [5]. Subsequent research has confirmed that systematic instruction in AWL vocabulary, particularly when combined with reading extensive authentic academic texts, produces measurable improvements in both reading rate and comprehension accuracy for second-language university students (Castles et al., 2018).
Academic words may refer to the words mostly found in special materials, for instance; textbook, codes of Law, contract etc. These documents have been written in the formal style. In dictionaries, these words were designated by the degree ‘formal’ or labelled with the branch of their field meaning, such as ‘Computer’ or ‘Food Science and Technology.’ In this group, people normally include the words called ‘technical terminology’ as well.
The relationship between word recognition fluency and reading comprehension remains a productive area of inquiry for applied linguistics and educational psychology researchers, particularly as digital reading environments introduce new variables such as hypertext navigation, multimodal content, and reduced sustained reading duration into the comprehension equation (Nation, 2022). Instructional programs that address both the automatic recognition of high-frequency words and the explicit teaching of academic and domain-specific vocabulary have shown the greatest empirical support for improving comprehension outcomes across diverse learner populations. Students and scholars seeking to strengthen their academic reading performance may find that combining spaced repetition vocabulary practice with daily engagement in discipline-specific texts produces more durable gains than either strategy pursued in isolation (Castles et al., 2018).
References
Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100618772271
Nation, I. S. P. (2022). Learning vocabulary in another language (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108899031
Perfetti, C., & Stafura, J. (2014). Word knowledge in a theory of reading comprehension. Scientific Studies of Reading, 18(1), 22–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2013.827687