Education

Missing Pieces In The Puzzle Of Reading Comprehension


A new audio documentary asks “why so many kids don’t understand what they read.” It provides part of the explanation, but to fully understand the problem—and what to do about it—listeners will need more information.

Radio journalist Emily Hanford has created a series of documentaries for APM Reports that explain, clearly and compellingly, why so many children can’t read. That is, she’s tackled one vital part of the reading process: decoding, or word recognition. Now she’s turned her attention to the other aspect of reading: comprehension, or—as the documentary is titled—”what the words say.”

As always, Hanford’s reporting makes for great listening. We meet a couple of boys at a juvenile detention center in Houston who are learning to read as teenagers, laboriously sounding out words like gloat—but then not knowing what they mean. A reading researcher vividly explains that many African-American kids face an additional obstacle because the language used in books is so different from how they speak.

And we hear the heartbreaking story of a Nashville mother, Sonya Thomas, whose pleas to address her son C.J.’s reading problems were repeatedly rebuffed by the school system. When C.J. reached seventh grade, he was still reading at a second-grade level. Thomas bursts into tears upon learning that his reading performance actually declined significantly during first grade. She’s crying not just for her son but for the millions of other kids—most from low-income families like hers—who have been failed by our schools.

“Why isn’t everyone in this country angry, like me?” Thomas asks, loading each word with intensity. “Why are they not losing sleep? It’s unacceptable for children to not have a chance right off the bat.”

She’s right. And to do something about this unacceptable situation, we need to know why and how it came about. Is C.J.’s problem that he wasn’t taught how to decode, or that he wasn’t equipped to comprehend what he was reading? As with most of the stories in What the Words Say, it’s both.

In her previous reading-related documentaries, Hanford laid bare why so many kids can’t read words: many teachers think they’re teaching phonics, but they haven’t been trained to do it effectively and systematically. Her explanation of why kids can’t understand what they read is, basically, that they haven’t been taught to decode early enough. Citing a widely used analogy to a biblical saying, she explains that the children who can read start devouring books, getting “richer,” while the rest get “poorer.”

“Let’s say you start school, and you get off to a good start learning how to decode words,” Hanford says in the documentary. “Now you can read the words you know how to say, and through reading you begin to learn the meaning of words you’ve never heard before. That’s how the rich get richer.”

But, as the documentary also explains, a major factor in whether you understand what you’re reading—and can learn new words from it—is how much knowledge you already have about the topic. Kids in New Zealand know about cricket, one expert says, so, if they can decode, they’ll have no trouble understanding an article about a cricket match—but they may be stumped by one about a baseball game. In the United States, you’ll find the opposite situation. Each group of kids might acquire more vocabulary pertaining to their respective sports through reading, but how do they acquire enough knowledge to understand the articles in the first place?

Most likely, it isn’t initially through their own reading. The New Zealand kids probably watch cricket matches with their parents, who explain what’s going on, talk about the sport with their friends, and maybe learn to play cricket themselves. That equips them to understand a written account of a cricket match and learn even more about cricket. (As a cricket ignoramus, I have tried to figure out the meaning of just one paragraph describing a cricket match by looking up the words I didn’t understand. It took me an hour, and it didn’t help.)

In school, if young children learn to decode, they may understand the simple books they’re expected to read at first, because the vocabulary consists mostly of words they already know. But at higher grade levels, many students will hit a wall. The books they’re expected to read will use more and more of the kind of vocabulary and syntax most kids don’t pick up through everyday conversation. Those things can’t really be taught on the spot; they won’t stick. Vocabulary is built gradually over many years, mostly indirectly through expanding kids’ knowledge of the world—history, geography, science, the arts. To become familiar with the peculiar conventions of written language, kids need to listen to and discuss books they can’t yet read themselves—and learn to use those conventions in their own writing. It’s important to begin all of this early, while kids are still learning to decode.

As the documentary acknowledges, “the rich get richer” trope isn’t just a metaphor for reading ability. The kids who are actually rich are the ones most likely to acquire the kind of knowledge needed to understand and learn new vocabulary from sophisticated text, largely because they tend to have more highly educated parents. Hanford interviews a professor whose young son was having trouble learning to read. The school’s only advice was to read to him, but the professor and his wife were already doing that. They started spending fifteen minutes a day giving him the kind of phonics instruction he wasn’t getting in school. The boy was off and running and is now poised for success in high school.

Well, okay, you might think, but surely the children who don’t have professors for parents are acquiring knowledge of the world from their teachers, beginning in the crucial early elementary grades. You would be wrong. In a misguided effort to boost reading test scores, elementary schools have marginalized or eliminated subjects that could build knowledge—social studies, science—to spend more time on reading. In the earlier grades, it might look like this approach is working, because—again—the books and tests don’t assume much background knowledge. But it backfires when kids reach higher grade levels.

The narrowing curriculum and its unintended pernicious effects on comprehension are briefly mentioned in the written version of What the Words Say, but they don’t show up at all in the hour-long audio version. Neither version mentions another important thing about comprehension: just as with phonics, teachers already think they’re teaching it. Guided by their training and their materials, they spend many hours every week on comprehension “skills and strategies,” like “finding the main idea” and “making inferences,” having kids practice on books on random topics that are easy enough for them to read on their own. Under pressure to boost scores, they also try to prep kids by giving them disconnected reading passages followed by comprehension questions, mimicking the test format. But these methods have no basis in science, and as evidenced by stagnant or declining test scores, they don’t work.

Of course kids like C.J. will get a better start if they’re taught how to decode early—and Hanford has performed an important public service by pointing out, once again, that’s not happening. But in most cases it will take a lot more than that to turn the most vulnerable children into competent readers and unlock their potential. One danger is that if students are taught to decode but still can’t understand what they read—because schools aren’t also building their knowledge—skeptics will say, unfairly, that phonics just doesn’t work. And we’ll be back where we started.

I hope that at some point, Hanford will bring her formidable talents to the rest of the story of why so many kids can’t understand what they read—and the increasing number of schools around the country that are teaching kids to decode and building their knowledge, simultaneously.



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