Reading plays a central role in our educational, working, recreational, and social lives. The ability to read is highly valued and important for social and economic advancement. Reading is the most important skill among the four language skills as it can improve the overall language proficiency. Even though one may have reading difficulties in his or her mother tongue, the problems get worse when reading is applied to a second language, as students might be lagging behind in a number of reading components, including accuracy, comprehension, and speed. Lagging behind is a cognitive difficulty associated with the process of reading in another language. In other words, these difficulties are more likely to be associated with the nature of the language pragma linguistic or even socio-cultural aspects.

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Comprehension is considered as the essence of reading as it accounts for the process that supports effective extraction of meaning from a written passage. Modern literacy standards require that the students can self-modify, self-manage and self-monitor as a means to become strategic readers who can select information from the text, develop rational and incorporate critical reflection on the text while reading. In this instance, the students are required to be provided with an extensive range of reading and writing activities that include effective reading comprehension techniques.
The practice of effective reading comprehension techniques is essential to enhance the extent of comprehension among students and thus, language instructors are required to implement adequate reading strategies to improve comprehension and facilitate critical thinking in understanding complex texts. Reading comprehension is comprised of complicated factors; mainly comprising of cognitive, linguistic and socio-cultural variables, due to which the development of an effective reading strategy is difficult for language instructors.
Reading comprehension promotes interaction between students and reading material, due to which reading objectives in language courses are rejuvenated to develop good reading practices. Furthermore, language instructors accentuate collaborative reading practices to provide the students with an effective means to engage in their social environment while developing their comprehension skills. The adequate social environment that can improve reading comprehension is comprised of literature circles, group discussions, reading apprenticeship, book clubs and author analyses. These activities result in stimulating an interpretive discussion among the students and utilize critical reflection while reading and engaging with texts.
Similarly, engaging readers in shared inquiry on account of a discussion-based reading model results in effective stimulation of cognition among students as they engage in reflecting and thinking about questions in a complex text. It has been implied that reading engagement is an antecedent of developing attentiveness among the students which eventually results in high performance of students in reading comprehension. The context of engagement resides in keeping the readers cognitively and behaviourally active and thus, it is essential balance of interest, self-regulation, motivation, reading attitude and involvement with text should also be included in measuring readers’ engagement.
GROUP STUDY
Group study/learning are activities organized so that learning is dependent on the socially structured exchange of information between learners in groups and in which each learner is held accountable for his or her own learning and is motivated to increase the learning of others. The spirit within the team has to be one of positive interdependence, that is, a feeling that success for any one is tied directly to the success of others. To put it more concretely, a cooperative learning approach defines the class as heterogeneous groups; the class is organized in groups of four or six students in order to fulfil a learning task cooperatively. The learning task is based on interaction and reciprocal interdependence among the members of group and requires mutual help. In this educational approach, students in group reading are in a state of dynamic cooperation and together build up an intimate learning and social atmosphere both in the classroom and outside the classroom.
READING COMPREHENSION
Mastering reading skill requires interaction between the reader and the text. The reader has to decode the meaning of the written words to be able to understand the writer’s point of view. Therefore, reading is the most important activity in any language class, not only as a source of information and a pleasurable activity, but also as a means of consolidating and extending one’s which are knowledge of the language”. Readers have to use their prior knowledge while reading in order to construct meaning.
Reading comprehension is the process of eliciting and making meaning through interaction and involvement with written language. The process is a task of both reader and text factors that happen within a larger social context. Comprehension is also the process in which readers make meaning by interacting with text through the combination of prior knowledge and previous experience, information in the text, and the views of readers related to the text.
However, the purpose is to get an understanding of the text rather than to acquire meaning from individual words or sentences. The outcome of reading comprehension is the mental representation of a text meaning that is combined with the readers’ previous knowledge. This is called a mental model or a situation model. This model defines what has been learned. Therefore, reading comprehension needs the successful expansion and arrangement of a lot of lower-and higher-level processes and skills.
GROUP STUDY AND READING COMPREHENSION AMONG STUDENTS
Reading is the most important skill that must be mastered by students in terms of getting meaning from a series of written symbols. Reading can help readers in many aspects such as entertaining, educating, communicating, and informing readers about the past, the present, and the future as well. Reading opens minds and intelligence, and the goals of learners in catching the knowledge and ideas. Success in reading is measured by the ability to comprehend the text. Reading comprehension is a process of extracting and constructing meaning through dealings and complicity with written words or symbols.
Group reading instruction includes rich tasks which promote deep understanding; allows teachers to teach reading before and during the reading process, (not only after the reading process); and allows instructors to adjust teaching to meet the needs of all learners. In groups everyone is engaged and everyone has a voice. Students can sometimes learn more from each other than they can from the teacher. Also, this mode of instruction involves the social context of learning. The classroom is clearly a place where people have to work together, essentially requiring a compromise between their own individuality and the dynamics of the whole group. It is ideally a co-operative environment. The teacher generally demonstrates such strategies for students until the students are able to carry them out independently."Pair and group work immediately increase the amount of student talking time". The tasks in the classroom should be focused on Student Talking Time, which comprises discussion and interaction among students and interaction with the teacher.
Group work and pair work have become increasingly popular in teaching since they are seen to have many advantages such as enhancing students reading comprehension and improved academic performance. Group work is a cooperative activity: four students, perhaps with a topic, are doing a role-play or solving a problem. In groups, students tend to participate more equally, and they are also more able to experiment and use the language than they are in a whole-class arrangement.
Pair work has many of the same advantages. The moment students get into pairs and start working on a problem or talking about something, many more of them will be doing the activity than if the teacher was working with the whole class, where only one student talks at a time. Both pair work and group work give the students chances for greater independence. Because they are working together without the teacher controlling every move, they make some of their own learning decisions, they decide what language to use to complete a certain task, and they can work without the pressure of the whole class listening to what they are doing. With learners working in groups or pairs they learn how to read and speak effectively, how to work out what texts mean how to gather important information.
CONCLUSION
Students are not just passive receivers of information but they are active makers of meaning. Successful readers try to apply numerous skills to grasp meaning from the texts. Readers should be involved in the reading process by using different strategies to monitor their meaning.
Conclusively, it is possible to say that reading comprehension can be better understood by sharing, exchanging and socializing through group work/study. It makes the classroom student-centred and the teacher can get the experience of finest activity in the classroom. The learners become freer and they can explore and notice their own improvement within a friendly and fellow feeling environment among themselves.