Are We Teaching Reading Comprehension? Part I

Tim, this is extremely helpful. I work with teachers who are exhausted and very busy teaching ELA, but this will help me help them understand that much of what they are doing is not teaching reading comprehension. I find that lack of teacher training in this area and lack of understanding by administrators and district leaders is my biggest hurdle. With these types of examples and more training, I think we could make a big difference. Our students spend a lot of time in class, but they are just not getting what they need to be better readers. I can’t thank you enough for your insight. You always break research down into layman’s terms, and you have been most influential on helping me teach teachers. Thanks again.

Seems to me that teaching text structure, transitions, and varieties of sentence syntax would be some means of teaching comprehension per your example. Additionally, these means are able to be assessed with independent reading to determine degree of transfer over time.

Very interesting article; I look forward to part 2.

I teach 3rd grade. I am concerned that we may often push our students harder than what they are developmentally ready to accept with many of these higher-order thinking skills, and all for the sake of high stakes testing.

I have been trained in the Science of Reading, and see many benefits of that research. However, I can’t help but consider how vastly different my own reading instruction and reading experience were like with whole language. I learned to read (spoiler alert to revealing my age) using Dick and Jane books. Where did the comprehension develop from that type of instruction? I don’t remember being specifically taught how to discern how sentences connected or how an author connected paragraphs, yet somehow I seemed to comprehend what I was reading. Additionally, I only recall one standardized test in elementary school — The California Achievement Test. I wonder if the lack of testing pressure allowed me to develop strong reading skills at the pace appropriate for me?

Mark Pennington - I agree with the different means of teaching comprehension you mention. I'm curious about the "assessments with independent reading" you mention. What would those look like?

Hi Tim
I mostly struggle with finding good rich texts for this reading comprehension! Right now I tend to make my own and try to find others. But if we are to really teach it right ..we really need rich texts and I struggle to find them. Would love your thoughts on this matter !

This new study has the potential to raise outcomes for kids as Hansford's Sold a Story has done. Kudos to Dr. Shanahan for featuring it.

A growing knowledge-centric movement suggests we cannot teach transferrable strategies. This claim is wrong. It suggests that strategies do not transfer across texts and cannot be used independently to build new knowledge. No research supports this claim.

The evidence overwhelmingly shows that students can learn and apply strategies to approach unfamiliar texts—even when they have little prior knowledge of the topic.

The key word here is transferrable.

Everyone agrees that knowledge-building and rich content are essential. (Though defenders of knowledge-centric try to paint anyone raising questions as anti-knowledge or anti-curriculum. This could not be further from the truth. Those defending strategies deeply value knowledge and curriculum.)

Over the past five years, a small connected group has been promoting the idea that foregrounding knowledge-building and downplaying the role of transferrable strategies is the bst way to help students navigate new texts.

- A side impact of this group has been that programs branded 'knowledge-building' sales have skyrocketed, yet with no evidence these perform better than all core program published after 2012 when the new standards dictated that all programs must be 50/50 informational texts / narrative stories. The differences between the new 'knowledge-building' branded and these core programs are unclear and there is no evidence swapping will raise outcomes. Yet, we've been swept away purchasing them in the hopes they will do better for kids. They don't seem to.

Knowledge-building helps incrementally over time, no doubt. But strategies help immediately—and significantly. Dismissing their importance risks weakening students' ability to navigate new material independently. We cannot teach all knowledge. Students must have a way to approach new unfamiliar topics.

Some argue that we have overdone comprehension instruction, but the reality is quite the opposite—we haven’t done it enough, or at least not well enough. Too often, strategy instruction is superficial, rushed, or ineffective, rather than taught deeply and practiced until it truly transfers. That is the point of this new landmark Capin study cited here.

This is not an either/or choice. Teaching both transferrable strategies and rich content is the most effective approach. Any programs published after 2012 can be used to do this. Shiney new branded knowledge-building that dismiss strategies are unlikely to have the impact that improving how we teach strategies will, according to this study would be a fair take on it.
Strategies must be explicitly taught and practiced until students can apply them independently—because transfer isn’t just possible, it’s the goal.

Jackie-
Text is central when it comes to teaching reading comprehension. It is essential that the text convey content that we would want our students to know and sufficient linguistic/textual/cognitive demands that would allow us to teach students how to negotiate those. That means high quality, worthwhile text, that is sufficient difficult. (I encourage the use of programs because I think it makes it possible for teachers to work through content/text demands in systematic ways that could increase kids' chances of learning.

tim

Lesley--

I ungraciously didn't mention it in this blog, but your heads up on the issue is what led me to write it.

thanks.

tim

Annette-
Like you, I learned to read from a version of the Dick and Jane books. Those programs had very little that we would accept as comprehension instruction (as you'll see in my next blog). There is no question that we can successfully teach reading without much explicit direction in this area. However, let's not think of reading ability as a discrete skill that you either have or don't have. The issue is how well do we want our kids to read. Reading achievement in the US hasn't risen since 1970 though the demands for literacy in our society have increased considerably. Don't think of this kind of article as addressing how can we teach reading but as how can we teach reading so that larger numbers of kids get to higher levels of achievement.

thanks.

tim

Hi Tim,
I agree that teaching two sentence definition/explanation text structure supports comprehension, but I think teaching the practice of referencing text would also help. The student, who is not a practiced reader, might not notice when reading and likely would not return to text. They assume that ‘good readers' just know. Maybe the teacher could have asked the student to return to paragraph 2 of the text and pointed out the 2 sentence text structure.

But most of all the 2 page reading scenario screams the student’s vocabulary and how best to increase it. Pre-teaching the tier 2 word ‘erode’ and the tier 3 version ‘erosion’ would have helped this student understand the passage. Throwing in a little morphology would be nice too... Mary BH

Thank you for your thoughtful blog!!! I like that you are talking about explicit “how to’s” in teaching reading comprehension. I feel like there are so many materials that claim to improve comprehension, but I don’t totally buy into their proclaimed results. I liked how you described that an author often defines and gives an example and that we can teach kids to pay attention to this as a strategy of comprehension. I would like to know if you have other tactics you feel truly beneficial to comprehension. One strategy I use is telling students that there will always be a main idea of a chapter or section, there will always be details of who, what, where, when, why, and how, background information and vocabulary are critical. I also have a “plot chart” out and tell them fiction (and life) are made up of these components. I look forward to the strategies you suggest teachers should employ to improve comprehension.

Rosalie--
That kind of thing happens often when folks are typing on their phones. It is not carelessness as much as incoordination. I know it happens to me too.

tim

Leslie, I couldn’t agree with you more! Funny enough, I just wrote all about the points you make on my latest blog post, which I published the day before Dr. Shanahan’s insightful (as always) words.

Jw and Annette-

Thank you for your insights on how high stakes testing has changed. The tests now are not gaged for appropriate child development levels. I don't think you can accurately compare student achievement now with results from past assessments. As to the "Dick and Jane" books, maybe the key there was simplicity. This is a word that I think all educators should think about.
Maybe students now are forced to overthink and overanalyze everything they try to read to the point where the whole process is seen as something very unappealing. Maybe we are asking students to take on too much too fast, and the process of enjoying and understanding books becomes a lost.

Not knowing American literacy history, it is not possible for me to comment on what was done in the US , historically.However I do know what was happening here in NZ and what I am interested in specifically that NZ scored the highest in reading comprehension , in an international test in 1970.

After the introduction of Whole Language and Marie Clay, about 1970 , we now score the lowest in English speaking countries.

Curiously much of the comprehension material for students prior to 1970 in NZ before WL, came from America.
This included basal readers , Whole Word Ginn ,McKee etc with the readers and accompanying workbooks, the SRA , class sets , as well and other programmes like the Reader' s Digest 's Skill Builders. The main point was that there was much emphasis placed on comprehension and exercises were done everyday in classrooms. In fact some days more than one comprehension exercise was done daily since the topic of 'English ', which concentrated on written and spoken work, also included comprehension .

By no means am I the first to say writing about a topic helps you understand the concepts better. In 'English' you were required to answer conventional direct comprehension exercises like : Why does ? Where is ? When ? etc and in then write in another section , which required research of the topic , to discuss more extensive and detailed aspects of the topic covered . If the topic was house building materials , you were asked to draw a plan of of your home and list all various materials used eg. Then direction was given to write two paragraphs describing the difference between brick houses and wooden ones.

Comprehension was clearly about acquiring knowledge.

I am unashamedly a traditionalist and believe there is a trend in the West to return to a knowledge rich curriculum , structured learning in not just literacy, along with handwriting and firm discipline and some rote learning in the basics and other aspects of traditional teaching . It is what I experienced when I was a child and I saw much superior academic achievement then, than what we have now .

Look forward to part 2 of this topic.

Deep comprehension requires cultural alignment: the reader's inferences align sufficiently with the author's implications to make sense. This requires deep knowledge by the teacher about authors' intentions so that rich learning dialogue can take place in the classroom. I'm particularly conscious of this from working with English as a Second Language students in cross-cultural classrooms. This knowledge goes much further than asking 'who, what, when, where, why'.
For example, here is the opening sentence from 'The Little Red Hen': 'Down the road and over the hill lived a little red hen.' You might ask 'where' and 'who', or you can explain to students that this is the sort of sentence that is typically part of a story orientation section: it begins with two 'where phrases' that describe the setting before we reach the main character; it includes the generic verb 'lived' to introduce the character; the noun group used to describe the character begins with the indefinite article 'a' to signal that we haven't previously met this hen, the adjective 'little' and the choice of 'hen' create a diminutive, female character with whom the reader can empathise. (It wouldn't work if it was a rooster.) I don't know why the hen is red except perhaps for assonance: i.e. 'red' and 'hen' share the same middle vowel that links them together.
These are examples of the sort of meaning-making that might be shared during whole class close reading, to develop common, transferable literate knowledge that students can subsequently apply in independent reading.

The end of year testing that students need to take has changed. They continue to get more and more difficult. This year our state is starting cluster tests. They look at the passages on the left side of the screen and then they answer questions with drop down answers. If they get one wrong if can effect other answers. Answers are not "right there." The majority of adults would not get the correct answer. How can people compare reading comprehension now from the past when the questions use to be choose a-d? The question now are sooo difficult I struggle getting them correct.

One aspect that connects both knowledge based curriculum focus and comprehension focus is vocabulary. They are reciprocal concepts in a way, especially for English language development.

Let's not put all decodable texts in the same basket. Sure, the contrived tongue twistered ones have no place in the teaching of reading, let alone comprehension, but there are phonically controlled texts out there for children at all stages of learning the code that are perfectly comprehensible with natural language patterns. So very useful for students learning the hows of understanding a text in the early years.

Berys-

Research has found only a small benefit for a brief period of time for decodables of any kind. I think their use is being overdone by people who are ignoring the "science of reading."

tim

Half the time we use decodables as dictation exercises for spelling .

Miriam P. Trehearne

It is important for classroom teachers, administrators and parents to understand that oral language (the foundation of all literacy learning), comprehension (word and world knowledge being key components), and writing are all "curriculum gap areas"
(Teale, Paciga, and Hoffman 2007) that in general deserve much more focus at school and at home!

Thank you again and again Tim for sharing what the research really tells us!

Dear Tim,

Thank you for this article on a critical subject. I really look forward to the next article, which I assume is going to be practical in the sense of sharing the key skills we need readers to have and how to teach/model these in the classroom. It may be a very rough generalization but that switch from 'learning to read' to 'reading to learn' is real and needs careful consideration.

You shared that one of the challenges in this area is researchers differing categorization of what is reading comprehension instruction and what is assessment of reading comprehension. I would love to know if there is more general consensus on what constitute the key reading comprehension skills that we need to teach students. That sort of practical listing is important for teachers and school leaders if we are to do a better job of teaching reading comprehension. The example you shared is a good case in point, because it is the sort of skill that can be practiced in every classroom. It seems to me that when we discuss transferable skills we are making the implicit statement that students transfer them from classroom to classroom. No doubt that's true, but it is most true I would guess when they have been mastered to some degree. The other way of looking at transferable skills is to think of their instruction as being transferable - I guess is what we mean when we say 'Everybody is a reading teacher'. The "Grand Canyon" example you gave in terms of content could appear in a text in a reading lesson, a social studies lesson or a science lesson. And while in many cases, particularly elementary classrooms, the same teacher may be teaching all subjects, there may well be situations where different teachers are involve, such as my school. This makes me think that we need every teacher to have some grounding in knowing and teaching effectively reading comprehension strategies. For that, we need a common understanding of what reading comprehension is and what teaching it looks like. Are we there yet? What I see among my colleagues in our school is a much richer understanding of learning to read than reading comprehension. Our collective efficacy as teachers of reading is tremendous and we take great pride in being intentional about early reading skills. We want to practice the same level of intentionality with reading comprehension.

As teachers, we aim to teach for comprehension? If so, that makes sense to me. Thanks for the blog post.

I'm a big believer in Reuven Feuerstein's approach to teaching. He talks about 'transcendence.' Your example of talking about how to infer the author's intent, even when she doesn't state it explicitly, is an example of 'how' to read it. Giving several different examples over a period of time, is 'transcendence.' It also is more transcendent if you talk about how we infer meanings in speech. For example 'Good job!' stated in one way is friendly, but you can say it in a sarcastic way, which makes it a condescending put down. Kids know about this at every level of elementary school, but they don't always realize how this same skill (understanding the intent of a speaker/writer) is needed in reading books. I believe that all of the reliance on 'comprehension questions', instead of the teacher choosing a skill like the one you mentioned, and reading informative passages on curricular areas (like an extended unit on geology, for example).