Reading Comprehension: The Need for a New Perspective

REVIEWS THE RESEARCH in reading comprehension and argues for and suggests a new perspective. The seven major approaches to comprehension are reviewed: 1] The Skills Approach, 2] The Measurement Approach, 3] The Factor Analytic Approach, 4] The Correlational Approach, 5] The Readability Approach, 6] The Introspective Approach, 7] The Models Approach. These approaches are criticized on the grounds that they have not produced much information about the comprehension process. This lack of knowledge of the comprehension process is attributed to the failure of past research to be theory based. A new direction is proposed which is based on linguistic theory and psycholinguistic research.