Senior High School Students' Comprehension Monitoring and Repair Strategies

Abstract

Comprehending an English text is not limited to decoding words; it also requires readers to notice, in real time, whether meaning is being built successfully and to act when that construction stalls. Classroom reading assessment, however, still relies heavily on final right-or-wrong scores, leaving this ongoing regulatory process largely undocumented. This study describes how senior high school students monitored their comprehension and repaired breakdowns while reading an English text. A descriptive qualitative design was used with six students from one class, combining non-participant observation and think-aloud verbalization; data were processed through Miles and Huberman's interactive analysis model. Results indicate that monitoring surfaced mainly through nonverbal behavior—frowning, pausing, and a slower reading tempo—rather than spoken statements of understanding or confusion, while repair relied almost entirely on rereading, with peer assistance used once and no student reading ahead, skipping, or consulting a dictionary. The study recommends explicit instruction in a wider range of repair strategies.