A New Paradigm

Interest in reading comprehension strategy research began to grow as a part of the new scientific understanding of comprehension This cognitive conceptualization of reading perceives the reader as an active participant who constructs meaning through intentional, problem solving processes. that emerged in the latter decades of the twentieth century.

In 1978 Walter Kintsch and Teun A. van Dijk, for instance, observed that a reader actively interacts with a text. In this new understanding of how we understand, a reader “makes sense” of how ideas based on the text relate to one another by interpretive interactions between what the reader takes from the text and what the reader already knows. Kintsch and van Dijk proposed that a reader actively builds meaning as mental representations and stores them as semantic interpretations held in memory during reading. These representations enable the reader to remember and use what had been read and understood.