On March 24th, the March mock test of the College Scholastic Ability Test took place. Surprisingly, for the subject of the Korean language, the first-grade cut-off was 75, which is low compared to previous cut-offs. Considering that the test was not that difficult compared to the previous tests, the reading comprehension of Korean students, at least that of 10th graders, is questionable. Though Korea is known to be a country with a literacy rate of 97.9%, which is high compared to other countries, thanks to the efficiency of Hangeu l, it seems that the reading comprehension ability of some Korean students is low.

This lack of comprehension phenomenon is not only limited to test results or academic circumstances. That is, some adults, even with standard education, have difficulty understanding the written text in interpersonal communication, social interactions, and workplace issues . For example, the Korean word “sa-heul” means three days and the first letter “sa” has the exact same pronunciation as the number four in Korean. Quite a number of students and even adults misunderstand that “sa-heul” means four days. Another example, the word “gum-il" means today, and it sounds similar to the Korean word for Friday. When a professor recently said the deadline was until “gum-il”, one student misunderstood that to mean it was until Friday, and even protested to the professor that he used an ambiguous word when announcing the deadline.

Before proceeding with the causes for low reading comprehension, let’s look at the definition of reading comprehension. Reading comprehension is the ability to read and understand, including the skills of summarizing; sequencing; finding the main idea, important facts, and supporting details; drawing conclusions, etc. As the definition shows, reading comprehension requires the readers not only to understand the meaning of the passage but also flexibly use the information given in the text.

These abilities can be interrupted by several factors, and we will focus on those related to the current situation of poor reading comprehension in Korea: lack of grammatical and linguistic competence, lack of concentration, and lack of motivation. It might be hard to believe these barriers have just recently interfered with the reading comprehension of students, as we now have more opportunities to learn and to communicate than ever before. Thanks to technological development and social media, we have become able to communicate almost anywhere and anytime with unlimited information and knowledge available for everyone. Despite this great ability to communicate with great sources, the development has been an obstacle to the quality of reading and communication.

The fundamental reason for the decrease in reading comprehension is that people read less. First, people desire to read less than before. Before the Internet became common, people had to get the information they wanted mainly through reading books or newspapers. Even after the emergence of the Internet, people still searched for some information in books and read what someone wrote. In contrast, instead of using Google or other search engines, most young people search YouTube, which provides information, – ranging from small life hacks to further studies for university subjects, through video rather than text. As the amount of reading decreases, the chance to learn new vocabulary decreases; the ability to comprehend long and complex sentences becomes poorer; and the ability to concentrate when reading decreases.

Secondly, people neglect reading. Reading is not something many do in their free time, but experts insist that people need to spend time reading and indulge themselves in it. Unfortunately, people do not spend time reading long passages. In one survey, four out of ten people in Korea answered that they only read one or two books a year. Generally, an increase in reading comprehension occurs only when one reads to learn and reflect on what they read, rather than just dealing with the common short text that they face in everyday life.

Finally, the tendency of students to use slang and read short passages also gives rise to low reading comprehension. Students prefer to read a text with easy vocabulary written in a spoken form, which makes them unfamiliar with high-level vocabulary and longer texts. Due to this tendency, a "three-sentence summary" has become popular among young internet users. As the users avoid reading longer passages, writers have started to write a three-sentence summary after their texts. This tendency undermines the ability to understand the relationship between two sentences or a paragraph and another paragraph and the entire flow of the text, therefore resulting in lower reading comprehension. Though students have been using slang a long time, the effect is much greater today due to fast communication and the quick spread of information enabled by technological developments.

It is true that one's reading comprehension can be improved by effort on an individual level. However, it is also true that this phenomenon can be solved much faster at a collective level.

More chances to enhance reading comprehension must be given at school. For example, teaching the Chinese characters again at school will help students absorb difficult words, as most Korean words consist of Chinese characters. Furthermore, students must be given enough time to read the texts in their books at school, not just make them read at home.

Reading comprehension is not only the ability to read and understand but also the ability to think within and out of the text. Therefore, the current phenomenon must not be made light of to avoid future problems.

For those who felt too lazy to read this whole article, here's my three-sentence summary

1. Many Korean students struggle with correctly understanding texts.

2. This is because they have less opportunity to read and absorb difficult vocabulary.

3. The problem can be solved on a collective level, by providing them more chances to read