Door Onderzoeken Leren Lezen

According to the speech theory of e.g Bühler and Wittgenstein the understanding of speech is more than transforming linguistic forms into semantic structures. The core of the process of understanding has to do with interpreting human activity. Modern research in the field of reading comprehension has demonstrated that knowledge of scripts, frames etc. plays a crucial role in the reading process. This also indicates that speech reflects the world of human ac-tivity. This means that, even when a reader has a good command of the language but has insufficient knowledge of and insight into this background, his reading comprehension will be poor.We take the position that the basic sense of speech is social meaning, which is enclosed in the relation between an utterance and the situation of interpersonal communication and co-operation. E.g. someone wants to sell a house, to inform about a country etc. Within such domains of co-operation language offers the means to indicate and to describe things in a world. Indication and des-cription in speech are always based on social meaning, i.e. they go back to common human activity.When we confine ourselves to informative texts, we think that description of the world we live in is based on common methods of exploring reality. Some of these methods are feature analyses, comparison, classification, process analyses and explanation. In a learning experiment during the third till the end of the sixth class in two elementary schools we taught the pupils to use these methods systematically by engaging them in the formal exploration and description of things, events etc.In this paper the outline of the experimental program is sketched. Some results are reported. It seems acceptable to conclude that reading comprehension is fostered by the experimental program. However, more data are needed for more definite and precise conclusions.