Appreciative level

Another deeper level of understanding is appreciative comprehension. It requires a personal response to a text and the reader responds to the text or story based on personal reaction and reflection. At this level the reader also responds to the author’s purpose (Araujo & Costa 2012). According to Chia (1996), ‘appreciative comprehension occurs when readers engage with a text and get an emotional response from the text’. This suggests that the appreciative level involves the students’ feelings towards the material read and it is considered more abstract than any of the other levels because a readers’ personality and likes or dislikes can affect comprehension at this level. Lin (2010) suggests that reading or comprehending at the appreciative level is done to gain an emotional or valued kind of response from a passage. This kind of reading is especially important when reading literature or poetry, for example, learners may give their feelings and personal responses in the Macbeth’s merciless killing of their visitor, King Duncan in the play ‘Macbeth’. It is important for learners to go through all four levels of comprehension if they are to read with total understanding and enjoy what they read.

In conclusion, high school reading, which is the focus of this study, needs highly developed decoding and comprehension skills. In addition, texts at high school level use academic words or low frequency words (Corson 1997) which are semantically opaque, (to be discussed in more detail in § 2.2.3). Many learners from various cultural backgrounds do not always get exposed to these words at school or outside school. As a result, it becomes difficult for them to understand texts with this academic language. Contrary to the early stages of learning to read where children learn the alphabetic principle and letter sound relationships, from about Grade 4 onwards reading should be well enough developed that it is fast and accurate and can become a tool for learning (Pretorius 2012). From Grade 4 onwards learners start being exposed to texts with unfamiliar content and low frequency words. By the time learners enter

high school they need to develop critical reading and thinking skills to be able to read and appreciate literature and to engage critically with any text they read. To understand texts at high school level, learners need to be able to process information at the evaluative and appreciative level as these levels are important for developing critical skills in today’s world. This study assessed comprehension at the literal, inferential and evaluative levels. This is because the Cambridge reading test used did not assess comprehension at the appreciative level.

2.1.3 Response

The third component of reading identified by Pretorius and Lephalala (2011) is response. Response relates to how a reader reacts to a text and engages with it as s/he reads it. Pretorius and Lephalala point out that readers’ responses to a text are closely tied up with their affective domain, their feelings, attitudes, perceptions and values. The issue of learner response to a text is important for the current study as it investigates the relationship between reading, vocabulary, reading attitudes and habits, and academic performance. The issue of ‘response’ sheds some light on how learner attitude affects current reading done by the learners and how it affects reading they would do in future. Research posits that the more positive the initial reading attitude is, the more likely a reader will initiate an act of reading (McTavish 2008; Pretorius & Lephalala 2011).

If learners struggle in their reading, they are likely to respond negatively to reading tasks. Once the response is negative, the act of reading is affected and the reader fails to enjoy the text read, and is unlikely to engage in reading activities voluntarily. This aspect is to be discussed again in § 2.4.

2.1.4 Metacognition

The fourth component of reading identified by Pretorius and Lephalala (2011) is metacognition. Metacognition is about awareness and regulation and it can be applied to any component of reading. It involves the ability to reflect on language and thinking and to act on them when required. Readers also use metacognition to monitor their comprehension, to repair failed

comprehension and to distribute attentional resources (McTavish 2008; Pretorius & Lephalala 2011).When applied to the field of reading, the concept of metacognition contributes to a constructivist understanding of how reading comprehension occurs (Tracy & Morrow 2006). McTavish (2008) points out that in the constructivist theory, when people learn something new, they bring to the reading situation all their background knowledge and current mental patterns.

Metacognitive theory also sheds light on how proficient readers mentally engage with the text during reading. Baker and Brown (1984) opine that proficient readers employ a number of metacognitive strategies during reading, such as being aware when meaning breaks down and adopting repair strategies such as rereading, slowing down or looking up word definitions to assist them understand a text. Pressley (2000) identifies other metacognitive processes that may assist proficient readers to comprehend what they read. Among these are making associations to ideas present, making predictions about what is coming up in the text or revising prior-knowledge that is inconsistent with ideas in the text.