Reading is a skill that is not learned naturally. The development of this skill is acquired little by little over the years. In this sense, the last thing that is acquired is reading comprehension.

Understanding what one reads is essential to be able to learn any content and information. It is the basis to be a good student. But, unfortunately, there are many children who do not reach this goal.

What does reading comprehension mean?

Normally people usually read to understand what they are seeing and to give or find a meaning to the reading, if not. It does not make any sense to read something, mainly reading comprehension talks about understanding what is being read and not only in understanding its meaning.

Therefore, this understanding talks about reading, understanding what you are reading. And apart from that, putting what you read in practice and relating that reading with your day to day now.

And that is exactly why people simply read by reading and knowing. But not by putting into practice what you are reading. This concept goes further beyond just reading and understanding.

How to develop reading comprehension?

It is necessary that the reader take into account all these suggestions when reading a text or a book, with the intention of acquiring new knowledge, it is important to carry out the development of reading comprehension, otherwise we would be doing nothing more that acquire more knowledge.

To develop a reading comprehension it is necessary to take into account the following suggestions:

• Knowing how to differentiate the main ideas found in the text, from the secondary ideas that you should not take so much importance.
• Relate and intertwine the meanings of what we are reading, more important to find a sense, either comparing or understanding.
• Sort each of the sequences of the text, so that there can be much more understanding in what is being read, if necessary until taking notes.
• Knowing how to recognize the relationships that exist between the paragraphs you have read, with the concepts you read earlier in the same text, or relate the concepts with what is going to be mentioned later.
• Learn to distinguish between the facts that have been described figuratively and those that are real.
• Read, analyze and understand the purposes with which the author made that text or book.
• The main thing you must do to develop reading comprehension, mainly in the motivation you have to learn and carry out new things you learn to generate new experiences based on something you did not know.

It is very important to take into account that we must highlight those things that we read in the text that we want to carry out in our personal or work life, or that is to trace the objectives that you want to reach after reading that text.

Cognitive processes involved in reading

The reading system consists of four different phases. Each of them is relatively autonomous. And is activated to perform a specific function. Thus, the four cognitive processes involved in the action of reading are:

• Perceptual processes. They are responsible for the decoding and recognition of letters or written characters.
• Lexical processes. They are launched when a word is processed. To carry out this operation, the Coltheart Model (1980) describes the use of two types of routes:
• The lexical route: directly connects the graphic signs with the meaning. So that words that are stored in memory as known are read visually.
• The phonological route: converts the letters into phonemes to arrive at the meaning.The importance of reading comprehension.
• Syntactic processes. They take care of processing of sentences, in order to build an appropriate syntactic structure by grouping words. For this, the Mitchell Model (1987) defines a series of strategies or keys that are developed in two different stages.

Semantic process Is involved in reading comprehension. For which, according to the Kintsch Model (1998), it is necessary:

• Extract the meaning and ideas of the text.
• Activate previous knowledge on the subject.
• Make inferences, self-regulate and maintain motivation.

Reading comprehension

To reach reading comprehension you must first develop phonological awareness. This is the ability to understand that words are made up of sounds. Then, automation or fluency and vocabulary are acquired. And, finally, comprehension strategies are assimilated.

In short, comprehensive reading is to analyze the information semantically. It is about reading slowly, paragraph by paragraph, trying to understand the meaning of the text.

The importance of reading comprehension

Currently, it is rare to meet someone who cannot read. Virtually all of society is literate. But it is common to meet people who do not have the capacity for reading comprehension fully developed.

Reading correctly not only consists of singing and having good fluency, but it is a much more complex process whose ultimate goal understands.

In fact, learning and assimilating knowledge could not be achieved without a good reading comprehension. Therefore, the acquisition of this ability prevents school failure.

Thanks to reading comprehension, we can solve problems more easily, both academically and in everyday life.

In the middle of the technological era, we have a multitude of information at our disposal. If we do not develop the capacity to understand it, we will be missing a valuable opportunity to enrich ourselves as human beings. In this sense.

Finally, reading comprehension has been the ability and process of understanding and understanding everything that is being read, as much as what is written, as what is profoundly related to what you are reading, this is why the importance of reading comprehension.

Some readings can lead you to improve, depending on the purpose for which you read, and others can take you simply to acquire that new knowledge and never take it out of your memory, or carry it out in any situation.

The importance of understanding is that we must learn to read, not only read to know, but read in order to carry out new actions in our life that help us grow or improve a certain aspect that we want to change.