WHAT ARE INTERPRETIVE SKILLS? - CULTURE VOCABULARY - 2025

The interpretative skills or reading skills are those that can recognize and understand the most important ideas in a text. In this sense, they are the competences that help to understand the meaning of a text as a complex structure full of different meanings.

Interpretive skills enable the identification and recognition of various situations, problems, propositions, graphics, maps, diagrams, and arguments contained in a text.

All this in order to understand its meaning and establish a position for or against what is proposed in the text. In other words, interpretive competences allow us to reconstruct a text in a particular and general way.

The interpretative ones are part of the three communicative competences, among which are also the comprehensive and the proactive ones.

The interpretation process is done through language and the way the reader understands reality. Therefore, interpretation cannot be understood as a decoding process, but rather as a complex event of mental events used to reconstruct an event and understand the information derived from it.

Finally, interpretive competences grant the possibility of producing new content, derived from what they understood from the text read and interpreted.

What is interpretation?

The term interpretation, according to Aleksandr Luria (one of the first authors of neurolinguistics), plays a fundamental role in the cognitive processes of the human being. It is also the way in which higher psychic processes are regulated in the human brain.

Interpretation is done through language, and this is the reflection of the individual vision that each person has of the world. In this sense, interpretation using the use of language determines the way we perceive and understand reality.

Thus, when the meaning of the word is modified, its linguistic sign and the way the reader understands its context is lost. For this reason, Luria indicates that reading cannot be a simple act of decoding signs, but rather a complex event in which the meaning of what is read is reconstructed.

The reader always interrelates the phrases with each other, going through different communication skills. In this way, the reader manages to understand the meaning of a discourse, going from the global to the particular.

This interpretive process is a dynamic process where words acquire meaning according to the mental structure of the reader.

Types of communication skills

Linguistically, three types of communication skills have been defined. Each type comprises a complex level of communication, which develops in a non-linear way according to the potential and prior knowledge of each subject.

Comprehensive or argumentative skills

Comprehensive communication skills are those that care about what is said. In this way, they try to make sense of any speech. They look for the argument within it.

Interpretive skills

Unlike comprehensive skills, interpretive skills seek to understand the reason for the discourse. In this way, it answers the question "for what?", In order to understand the intention of what is said.

In turn, this communicative competence uses the essence of interpretation to propose new concepts, realities, and ideas.

These new constructions are born from the reader's understanding and their ability to know the different systems, rules, and codes (verbal, cultural and social) existing within their context.

Purposeful skills

The propositional competences speak of the social, cultural and ideological elements that are part of the discourse.

They are in charge of answering the question "why?", Being a way of seeking to establish relationships between different discourses and contexts. This type of communication skills are located at the level of the metasemantic and intertextual.

Functioning of interpretive or reading skills

The starting point of interpretive competences is asking questions that allow us to understand the meaning of a text.

Some authors like Van Dijk affirm that a text can be reduced to a smaller number of propositions without losing its meaning. On the other hand, the interpretation of a text depends entirely on the reader, since this is the one who is in charge of understanding its meaning.

The understanding of this meaning is linked to the mental representation that a person makes of the concepts, influenced by their previous experiences.

This mental structure makes it possible to understand the meaning of words even when they are misspelled. This is because the interpretive process is complex, and is linked to different structures of thought.

Qualities

Interpretive competence enables the reader to understand the meaning of words and relate and integrate them with their prior knowledge.

Another quality of this competence is that when applied it allows the reader to produce new ideas and arguments, advancing in the creation of knowledge and the understanding of related topics.

It allows the critical and autonomous analysis of a discourse, in order to make sense of it and use it later.

The school

Nowadays, schools give greater importance to interpretive competences, since they present a lesser interest in memorizing the contents and a greater interest in understanding its meaning.

Reading comprehension has acquired a new importance that allows the strengthening of other mental abilities, developing logic and linguistic sensitivity.

Therefore, for any student to be competent at an interpretive level, they must first understand what interpretive competences consist of, and thus, later analyze the content of a text.

At the school level, interpretive competence is related to the semiotic and cognitive capacities of the reader.

These abilities allow the student to read, understand, find a meaning to what is read and use intellectually those of the content that may be useful to produce another text, graphic, map, among others.

Types of readers

Bad: it only identifies specific information in the text.

Regular: identifies more complex information, makes simple inferences, is capable of integrating information that is segmented and establishes relationships between all parties.

Good: identifies implicit information present in texts, capturing different nuances and critically evaluating them. He is capable of posing hypotheses.

References

1. (October 16, 2010). Reading skills. Obtained from INTERPRETIVE COMPETENCES: equipo3diplomadoiava.blogspot.com.
2. Manrique, JF (2014). DEVELOPMENT OF INTERPRETIVE COMPETENCE IN STUDENTS. Bogotá, DC: FREE UNIVERSITY.
3. thinking, E. (2017). The thinker. Obtained from Interpretive Competences: educacion.elpensante.com.
4. Quindio, C. d. (October 28, 2013). Cronical del Quindio. Obtained from Development of argumentative and propositional interpretive competences: cronicadelquindio.com
5. Rastier, F. (2005). Interpretive semantics. Paris: Twenty-first century.