Reading comprehension processes in language-sensitive teaching

Texts are a central medium in (subject) teaching at school. Understanding texts and tasks is essential for learning subject content in any lesson. Factual and technical texts frequently present difficulties for students dealing with their complex, specific demands and these difficulties are often considered a consequence of dealing with features of educational language. Attempts have therefore been made to simplify the surface linguistic features in factual and input texts for tasks. However, these studies revealed minimal to no effect on text comprehension.

In text comprehension, it is above all the interdependence between linguistic structures in texts on one hand and cognitive processes in reading on the other hand which must be taken into account. This article will make clear that the various cognitive levels involved in text comprehension must interact with the "text on paper" in order to arrive at a "text in the head" (Nussbaumer, 1991).

On the side of the text, the focus here is primarily on text coherence while on the side of the readers, the focus is on individual reading-related skills and abilities.

It is worth examining the comprehension of factual and specialised texts in detail so as to deal with texts in language-sensitive subject teaching as only then can we understand what obstacles are present and what support is possible.