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Word Level and Discourse Processing of Text

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Reading Comprehension

Abstract

This chapter focuses on language and comprehension at the local or word level and sentence level of text processing. English is more than just a phonetic language; printed words are not only composed of phonemes and graphemes but are also represented as meaning constituents in the form of morphemes, words, phrases, sentences, etc. It is asserted that these meaning constituents will play a vital role in efficient reading comprehension. The chapter will develop the notion that it is not only the breadth of word knowledge that is important for reading progress but it is also reliant upon the depth and quality of the lexical representations encoded in memory. However, good comprehension is not only confined to the knowledge of word meanings but is also related to other factors such as vocabulary, context, and fluency that extends meaning to connected text.

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Woolley, G. (2011). Word Level and Discourse Processing of Text. In: Reading Comprehension. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1174-7_5

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