The Pupil and Comprehension of Texts

The two key notions this paper is based on are the pedagogical text and text comprehension. The pedagogical text is defined as any text which serves to accomplish the instructional objectives of the school or other educational facility in which it is used. Its impact is cognitive, affective and regulative. Pedagogical texts are categorized according to modes of presentation, form, function in the instructional process, authorship and origin.
Text comprehension is defined as a way of conscious acquisition of information from the text. The substance of comprehension is in identification of meanings 1. between text elements, 2. between text elements and items of the objective reality which are designated by the elements. The process of text comprehension is by no means a mechanical one. In a way, the recipient becomes the coauthor of the original text.
Two criteria of text comprehension are defined: amount of the text comprehended (i. e. the number of meanings the pupil identifies at each of the text levels) and depth of the text comprehension, which is expressed by the text level the pupil comprehends. The higher the level he comprehends, the better his achievement is. The hierarchy of the text levels is as follows: comprehension of words, intrasentential comprehension, intersentential comprehension, identification of the text macrostructure.
The most frequent methods for assessment of text comprehension are: observation of nonverbal behaviour of the pupil during the text reception, observation of loud reading of the pupil, text reproduction, questions, cloze test and text summary.