Teachers as Readers- Theme 1: What do we mean by reading comprehension?

So, for this month's pleasure reading I read the book Sleep Smarter by Shawn Stevenson. The book is about sleep and how important sleep is for the human body. It also goes in-depth of essential strategies that people can implement in their daily lives to gain a more restful and deep sleep.

When reading this text, I did not realize my connections to the text because the metacognitive strategies, listed by Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmermann in Mosaic of Thought, have become of second nature. However, when I thought in retrospect, I had many text-to-self realizations and was monitoring my thoughts to make sure I understood the context. Because the book itself listed the useful strategies, I was self-monitoring to remember the strategies and even thought to myself on how I could implement this strategy. In a sense, I was doing a close reading through self monitoring, as describe in Sunday Cummins text Close Reading of Informational Texts.

Also, the book itself was not a hard read at all. The terminology used in the text were basic vocabulary and anytime there was a scientific word, Stevenson explained the word through layman terms. I was able to reading through the book without having to struggle and stumble upon words; this shows that the text was on-level for me, but still challenging enough to keep me engaged. I link this back to the article by Richard Allington because he states "struggling readers just participate in too little high-success reading activity every day." I thought to myself, if this text was extremely difficult to the point where I was not able to read out the words, why would I want to read this? The enjoyable part of reading would be lost and not understanding how to identify the words would get lost in translation during comprehension.

In this reading process, it was not tedious nor difficult; it was pleasant, enjoyable, and relaxing. That is how reading comprehension should be to all students and adults. The overarching idea I stemmed from the readings is that reading comprehension should not be a grueling strategy to learn. It is a concept that should be implemented through various strategies and the strategies should build upon one another. It should never just be one strategy at a time, but in the end, be all strategies working in unison.