Math is relentlessly hierarchical—you can’t understand multiplication, for example, if you don’t understand addition. Reading is mercilessly cumulative. Virtually everything a child sees and hears, in and out of school, contributes to his vocabulary and language proficiency. A child growing up in a book-filled home with articulate, educated parents who fill his early years with reading, travel, museum visits, and other forms of enrichment arrives at school with enormous advantages in knowledge and vocabulary. When schools fail to address gaps in knowledge and language, the deficits widen—a phenomenon that cognitive scientist Keith Stanovich calls the “Matthew Effect,” after a passage in the Gospel of Matthew: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” The nature of knowledge and vocabulary acquisition all but assures that children raised in language-rich homes gain in reading comprehension, while the language-poor fall further behind (see “A Wealth of Words,” Winter 2013). “The mainspring of [reading] comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read,” explains Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia.
To make matters worse, most reading curricula have focused on developing generalized, all-purpose reading-comprehension “skills” uncoupled from subject-specific knowledge—reducing a complex cognitive process to a collection of all-purpose “reading strategies” to be applied to any book or bit of text that a student might encounter. Attempts to teach reading comprehension as knowledge-neutral put an enormous premium on student engagement. For teachers, reading instruction can often feel more like cheerleading: sell kids on the magic of books, get them to read a lot, and—voilà!—they will emerge as verbally adroit adults with a lifelong love of reading. As generations of results show, this approach doesn’t work. (...)
Reading comprehension, like critical thinking and problem solving, is what psychologists call “domain-specific”: you need to know something about a topic to be able to think about it. Faced with a text passage about the customs of New Amsterdam, the student familiar with the topic may breeze through with relative ease. For the student who has no idea who the Dutch were, or is unfamiliar with early New York history or has never heard the word “custom,” the passage is a verbal minefield. To shift metaphors, a piece of text is like a tower of wooden blocks, with each block a vocabulary word or a piece of background knowledge. Pull out two or three blocks, and the tower can still stand. Pull out too many, and it collapses.
Imagine taking a child to his first baseball game. If you know baseball, you will easily explain what’s happening. You draw the child’s attention to the most important actions on the field, reflexively tailoring your explanation to the child’s level of understanding. If the child knows nothing about baseball, you might explain the basics: what the pitchers and batters are doing. Balls and strikes. Scoring a run when a player makes it all the way around the bases without being called out. You’d explain what an “out” is. If the child knows the game or plays Little League, you might instead draw his attention to game strategy. Would a bunt or a stolen-base attempt be the best move at a crucial moment? You might point out when the infielders move in, hoping for a double play.
Now imagine attending a cricket match and doing the same thing, assuming that you know nothing about the game. Your knowledge of baseball doesn’t transfer to cricket, though both games feature balls, bats, and runs. “Sports comprehension strategies,” if such existed, would be of no use. Your ability to make sense of what’s happening in front of you and to explain it to a child depends on your knowledge of the specific game—not your ability to connect what you notice to other games that you understand. The same is true of reading. Even if you aced the verbal portion of your SATs, you will find yourself in situations where you are not an excellent reader. You might struggle to make sense of a contract, say, or a new product warranty. Your tech-savvy teenage daughter might have an easier time understanding the instructions for upgrading a computer operating system. You didn’t suddenly become a poor reader in these situations; you’re merely reading out of your depth.
Reading comprehension, then, is not a skill that you teach but a condition that you create. Teachers foster that condition by exposing children to the broadest possible knowledge of the world outside their personal experience. As Daniel Willingham aptly titled one of his instructional YouTube videos a few years ago, “Teaching content is teaching reading.”
The specific body of knowledge that students need for broad reading competence is open to debate, but a useful guideline is to emphasize the common body of knowledge—from basic knowledge of history and science to works of art and literature—that most literate Americans know, as reflected in their speech and writing. This has been the precise aim of E. D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge movement. Hirsch’s critics have often accused him of attempting to impose a rigid canon, but Core Knowledge is better understood as an attempt to curate and impart the basic knowledge of history, science, and the arts that undergirds literate speech and writing. Regardless of whether schools adopt the Core Knowledge approach or develop their own catalog of essential knowledge, knowledge acquisition belongs at the heart of literacy instruction.
by Robert Pondiscio, City Journal | Read more:
Image: Henri Matisse’s portrait of his daughter reading
