Experiencia para mejorar la comprensión lectora.

Abstract

In this paper, we describe an innovative experiment to improve reading comprehension. This project was carried out during the third term of the academic year 2014/2015, in a High School in the Autonomous Community of Cantabria. The experiment aimed to value two different hypotheses about how to improve reading comprehension in students in the first cycle of Obligatory Secondary Education (Spanish ESO) through a total of six sessions. It was implemented in a pedagogical and linguistic framework in which particular relevance was given to concepts such as, for instance, students’ previous knowledge, or the activation of schemas and contents considered as significant by the students. All the sessions had a common denominator: that the proposed teaching innovation should be motivating for the students. To achieve this motivation, an absurd phrase or sentence was intentionally included in a text previously selected from different proposals by the students themselves. The presence of this meaningless sentence in the text made for an increase in the students’ retention of its content, as was verified in this experiment. Next, the students had to summarize everything they had read until the moment they had detected the absurd sentence. Students therefore not only focused on detecting the meaningless expression but also on the whole text. The results obtained were completely satisfactory since we ascertained an improvement not only in students’ memory and comprehension skills but also in their reading speed.