Reading comprehension strategies
In reading, novices and experts use their background knowledge, some existing cues in the text, and the situational contexts that are combined into a kind of a meaning model constructor of the text. Novice readers sometimes can act like experts when they are given a text and task where they have the appropriate knowledge. On the contrary, expert readers can become novices when they are exposed to ambiguous texts or new information. Accordingly, those two important characteristics of readers, namely, the knowledge that they have and the strategies that they use to foster and maintain understanding, play important roles in distinguishing between the old and new views of comprehension.
On the one hand, strategies emphasize reasoning and reasoning and critical abilities can be used when constructing and reconstructing the expanding meaning of the text. On the other hand, skills tend to be related to a low level of learning and thinking. Moreover, the strategies and skills of readers are also different in terms of awareness. Strategies signify metacognitive awareness. Expert readers can reflect what they do while reading (Baker & Brown, 1984), and they have the awareness to judge and evaluate their understanding. This awareness tends to lead to regulation and repair. In the traditional skill curriculum, presumably, by doing a repeated practice and drill, readers would directly use the skills they have learned to everything they read. No room for neither intentionality nor consciousness will emerge in using these skills; in short, skills will be used automatically or unconsciously.
Comprehension monitoring
Comprehension monitoring is an ongoing activity that evaluates and regulates the understanding of an individual from a written (or spoken) text (Baker, 1984; Baker & Brown, 1984). Furthermore, comprehension monitoring is defined as a metacognitive process affected by person, strategy, and task variables (Wagoner, 1983). This activity encourages students to become active during the process of understanding in reading the section (Casanave, 1988). Comprehension monitoring becomes one of the strategies used in reading comprehension because of its ability to enhance learning.
Moreover, comprehension monitoring consists of two parts of processes: (1) being aware of the quality and degree of the understanding of an individual and (2) knowing what to do and how to do it when one finds a comprehension failure. Expert readers are better than the novice ones when using the available resources like looking back to the text to solve the problem. Alessi, Anderson, and Goetz (1979) claimed that the lack of knowledge in the consequence of deficits or losing information could be restored almost completely when using an induced look-back strategy on the part of college students. They also found that the monitor of a good reader not only occurs in comprehension monitoring but also becomes the key to restoring the lost comprehension. Monitoring takes a big role to differentiate between expert and novice readers.
Graphic strategies
A graphic strategy is a common approach to be used in reading strategies. It can be used as a preview phase before reading, throughout the reading process, and at the phase after reading (Dowhower, 1999). The whole text structure and the interrelations among concepts are shown in the graphic with a visual method that provides readers a clear and prime understanding of what is being read (Robinson, Katayama, & Fan, 1996). One of the graphic strategies is the concept map (Novak, 1990).
Concept mapping offers a graphic strategy that provides readers with new approaches to reading that are different from traditional (Chang et al., 2002) and also lets learners organize information through visual aids (Liu, Chen, & Chang, 2010). That kind of action can stimulate their metacognitive awareness (Chang et al., 2002). However, concept mapping can also promote some difficulties; they can be idiosyncratic in terms of design that they require some expertise to learn, and because of their complexity, they may not always assist memorability (Davies, 2011).
A previous study conducted by Liu et al. (2010) on concept maps on EFL for college students involved 192 freshmen who were divided into two groups. Their experiment used nine articles from English magazines as the reading material, and they used the reading test provided by the magazines for evaluating the students. The reading test consists of 22 reading comprehension questions, and the test duration is 60 min. They also used a revised questionnaire from the questionnaire of Yang (2003). Their experiment was conducted for 10 weeks; each class was allocated 2 h a week. Before the experiment, each group was given a pre-reading test. They classified the students into good and poor readers on the basis of the test. The result confirmed that the concept mapping for the reading strategy was more effective than that for the traditional reading strategy to improve the reading comprehension of poor readers, and for good readers, the learning effect between the experimental and control groups was not always found. They concluded that concept mapping helps students analyze the structure of an article, especially for poor readers.
Chang et al. (2002) conducted a study using a concept map with an expert-generated map. They also argued that using an expert-generated map might reduce teacher workload and help avoid student cognitive overload. In their study, the scaffolding group used the expert-generated map employed as a scaffolding instruction with spatial learning strategies. The structure of the expert-generated map was given to the learners as a kind of skeleton structure, but the text in some node was removed so the learners must fill the text by choosing the correct text from the provided list of words. The scaffolding was a teaching method that provides different degrees of assistance for a learner according to his/her progress. In the beginning, the learners were provided with a complete expert map, so they could analyze the relationship between the map and the reading material. If their performance improved (the percentage of correct propositions increased compared with that in the previous map), then the expert-generated map would be given as an incomplete map and finally without a map at all (an empty canvas like the original concept map). Another use of the expert-generated map in their study was a map-correction approach. In this method, the learners were provided with 40% of the incorrect node interrelation of the expert-generated map according to the reading material. The learners were asked to correct the node contents without fixing the map structure. Chang et al. (2002) included 126 fifth grade elementary school students. They divided the group randomly into four (scaffolding-map, map-correction, map-generated, and control groups): one control group and three experimental groups. In the control group, students were asked to read and make a summary from the article provided for the experiments. Two out of three experimental groups used an expert-generated map. This experiment was conducted for 7 weeks using reading comprehension and summarization test as covariates. The experiment result corroborated that the map-correction group was improved more than the map-generation and control groups. The map-generation map score was not so different from that of the control group. In contrast to the map-generation group, the map-correction group outperformed the control group in all tests. Chang et al. (2002) also suggested that using scaffolding or map-correction strategies may be a potential approach in a concept map.
Kit-build concept map
The KB-map method is a kind of concept mapping method. In terms of understanding measured by the comprehension test right after the reading process, the KB-map has been proven to have the same efficiency as a normal concept mapping method (Alkhateeb, Hayashi, & Hirashima, 2013). Moreover, the KB-map has prime efficiency in terms of recalling information in the text. The KB-map is a closed-end concept map. It means that the students cannot create their concept and link since it is provided by the system from the dissembled expert map. This kind of approach may reduce teacher workload and learning complexity. However, sometimes, learners make an incorrect proposition because of their capabilities on processing texts, and it would be more difficult if they have some time limitation to complete all the processes (classroom situation). The closed-end approach can also be easily taken into the automatic diagnosis of the constructed map of the learners because it has the same component as the expert map. Therefore, finding a difference among them from the diagnosis result form will be feasible. Using the provided component, learners can construct a map limited by the component itself, unlike the concept maps where learners can freely create the component and the map by themselves.
Several main phases are available in the KB-map: the first phase is goal map building, the second phase is learner map building, and the third phase is a KB analyzer. Goal map building is a phase where the instructor or the teacher or the expert will construct the map from the information source or reading material, and this map will then be called a goal map. Thereafter, the goal map will be dissembled into parts or components consisting of nodes and links called kit. Learner map building is a phase where the learners will reconstruct the map from the provided node and link, and the constructed map by the learners will be called learners’ map. In this reconstruction process, learners can only reconstruct a proposition into the map from the provided link and node, and they cannot create any new links or nodes. This process is different from the study conducted by Liu et al. (2010) where students were not provided with anything; hence, they needed to create their own node and link as the original concept of concept map. The process is also different from that conducted by Chang et al. (2002, 2001), where students from a scaffolding method group were provided with a complete expert-map structure with an empty text in some nodes and links; thus, the students needed to fill the text by choosing it from the list provided by the system. The KB analyzer phase is where the teacher or the instructor or the expert will check the learners’ map compared with the goal map. The analysis will automatically be provided by the system by using the exact matching method. The exact matching method compares each proposition on the goal map and learner’s map (Fig. 1).
Alkhateeb et al. (2013) conducted a study by using the kit-build concept map compared with the selective underlining strategy to support reading comprehension in EFL. The selective underlining strategy is where students organize what they have read by highlighting, underlining, or selecting the phrases, words, key concepts, and sentences that are important or central to understanding the reading. In this experiment, eight third grade Japanese students of Information Engineering Faculty were involved. Their Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) score was between 430 and 625. The students were divided into two groups. They were divided equally on the basis of the aptitude pre-reading test. The experiment was conducted six times by using six different reading materials. The result was measured by using an immediate and delayed test and confirmed that the KB-map had a better effect on recalling the comprehended information 2 weeks after being used.
KB map with source connection
To improve the process of learning during map construction, we have added the source connection function to the KB-map. This function aims to facilitate learners to make confirmation of their understanding in the form of learners’ map with the reading material. It prompts learners to confirm each proposition by making a connection between a proposition and a specific sentence of the reading material. After the connection is made, the color of the proposition will be changed into black, and the selected text will also be changed into red (Fig. 2).