Text Comprehension: Features, Types, Coherence and Techniques

Comprehension

Comprehension: the ability to understand a particular topic or issue.

Text

Text: Communication is a linguistic unit with a given convention and a linguistically well-structured semantic interpretation, which depends on the socio-cultural context.

Features

• Communicative and social function.
• Manifestation of the author's intention to communicate.
• Performed in a sequence of sentences.
• It should be consistent.
• It must have unity.

Types of Texts

Expository

Expository: scientific, technical, academic, journalistic, legal, institutional, commercial.

Literary

Literary: short stories, novels, poetry, theater.

Compression Techniques

• General reading of the text.
• Clarify unfamiliar vocabulary.
• Accuracy of details.
• Questioning.
• Development of a summary.
• Sample: cursor thought expansion mechanism; the phenomena of coherence.

Thesis

Thesis: the idea that the author expresses clearly and accurately and from which other secondary ideas can be derived.

Expansion Mechanism

Expansion mechanism: generalization, repetition, addition of ideas, illustration, justification, contrast.

Phenomena of Coherence

Phenomena of coherence: synonymy, pronominalization, agreement, punctuation, ellipses, connectives.

Mechanisms of Expansion

• Generalization: when the subject is generalized in a reading.
• Repetition: expresses the same idea several times but in different words.
• Addition of ideas: adds ideas to the thesis or main idea.
• Exemplification: shows what the theory says.
• Rationale: expresses the same content in a different way.
• Contrast: indicates differences to clarify the true thought.

Coherence Phenomena

• Synonymy: coincidence or similarity in the meaning of words.
• Pronominalization: replacement or duplication of an already expressed element using pronouns.
• Consistency: the correspondence between words, phrases and sentences.
• Connectives: words that connect clauses, sentences or ideas.
• Punctuation: guides the reader regarding meaning, intonation and pauses; it gives meaning to the reading.
• Ellipsis: omission of a word or sentence that is not necessary for understanding the topic.

Techniques and Tools for Understanding the Text

• Recall the main ideas.
• Contextualize the information.

Analysis

ANALYSIS: to decompose a whole into parts to know its nature.

Summary

SUMMARY: the recomposition of the parts from the decomposed analysis, uniting them consistently.

SUMMARY: present in fewer words something that has been said, expressed, or written.

Lexical Relations

Synonyms

SYNONYMS: different spelling or pronunciation; same or similar meanings.

Antonyms

ANTONYMS: different spelling or pronunciation; contrasting meanings.

Paronyms

PARONYMS: similar spelling and similar pronunciation; meanings that may differ.

Homophones

HOMOPHONES: same pronunciation; different spelling and meaning.

Homographs

HOMOGRAPHS: same spelling; pronunciation or meaning may differ depending on context.