Pathways to Information: Accessing Knowledge by Leveraging Language (Part 2)

Since written language is generally more complex than oral language, how do we help students unlock academic vocabulary and complex language structures so they can earn and bank knowledge?

Part 2: Tricks of the Trade–or the Trade Itself?

Part I: Types of Knowledge explored how strategic knowledge can provide a plan of action to guide students to learn and retain information. Carl Hendrick (How Learning Happens) emphasizes the importance of understanding cognitive load theory and recognizing the need to ask students to retrieve something in a range of different ways, across a range of different times and to apply it in a range of new ways. This understanding, in turn, enables teachers to become better decision-makers and more effective in both lesson planning and delivery.

The Magician Will See You Now: Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham (The Reading Mind) provides further context related to strategic knowledge. In his highly influential article The Usefulness of Brief Instruction of Reading Comprehension Strategies (2006), Willingham asserts:

It appears that reading strategies do not build reading skill, but rather are a bag of tricks that can indirectly improve comprehension. These tricks are easy to learn and require little practice, but students must be able to decode fluently before these strategies can be effective.

Of the three highlighted assertions, the last one, the ability to decode fluently is self-evident, and the importance of this claim will be explained at the end through research related to the decoding threshold. However, the other two claims—easy to learn and require little practice—run up against my classroom experiences and require analysis within that context.

First, a word about the tricks, which Willingham asserts can be recruited to address three factors related to reading comprehension:

(1) monitoring your comprehension, (2) relating the sentences to one another, and (3) relating the sentences to things you already know.

How, he asks, can we instruct students to do these three things? I’ll answer with a question: Is it possible that operationalizing these tricks depends on understanding the trade we’re in and its implications for instruction? If our business is language development, then the tricks of the trade are directly related to unlocking that language, with the knowledge contained therein hopping on board as a bonus. That’s why relating the sentences to one another is a large part of what we do.

For example, my second grade reading intervention students work with informational text to address their difficulties with decoding multisyllabic words, thereby improving their decoding skills and practicing fluency while also building knowledge. These informational pieces, especially later in the year, teach the appositive with phrases like: ‘ground, or forest floor’ and ‘places, or habitats’. In other words, they provide a common word followed by the content-specific synonym, alerting students that an appositive is a noun or noun phrase that renames or explains another noun or noun phrase in a sentence.

But mastering the significance of this construction is not that easy for many of my students. I spend a lot of time directing their attention to these noun phrases so that they learn the structure of the appositive well enough to extract the new vocabulary and apply both the content knowledge and grammatical knowledge to the future texts they read.

The time devoted to teaching these tricks that help unlock comprehension may only need to be brief, as Willingham asserts, but their repeated application to texts read reinforces the acquisition of the strategy as the students perfect it—in this case the trick of recognizing the conjunction ‘or’ preceded by a comma and followed by a (usually unfamiliar) noun.

Unsurprisingly, the success rate in mastering an understanding of the appositive will vary depending upon the student. Just as some students only require one to four decoding efforts to orthographically map a word, dyslexic students can require ten, twenty, or even more exposures. This is why I like to distinguish between practicing strategies and applying them, with each application providing an opportunity for students to become more proficient in utilizing them to access knowledge.

In light of this declaration of how easy to learn strategies are and how little practice they require, Willingham makes a somewhat startling admission:

The studies may well underestimate how much reading strategies actually help. When a teacher presents a reading strategy to students, we can assume that there are three types of students in the class:

(1) students who have already discovered the strategy (or something similar) on their own

(2) students who are not fluent enough decoders to use the strategy

(3) students who are good decoders but don’t know the strategy

Only the last group of students will benefit from reading strategy instruction.

I want to emphasize, based on experience working with hundreds of these three types of students, that—yes—most definitely yes—the studies may well underestimate how much reading strategies actually help. All the more reason to teach them and practice applying them.

The Decoding Threshold—and Other Mental Strains: Many of us teaching in challenging environments with high-needs students (including English Learners), who often come into our classrooms having had few literacy experiences in the home, find the last two profiles often dominate our rosters: students who are not fluent enough decoders to use the strategy but can adopt it when they’ve attained that fluency along with students who are good decoders but don’t know the strategy and need to learn it.

First, a look at students who are not fluent enough decoders to use the strategy. The ability to decode fluently is discussed in the webinar The Decoding Threshold: Is It the Missing Piece in Reading Instruction and explained by Robert Pondiscio in Cracking the Code Behind Dismal 8th Grade Reading Scores as follows:

A recent research brief from the ETS researchers put the matter succinctly and starkly: ‘If children do not have adequate word recognition skills, their reading comprehension often won’t get better no matter how much direct support for comprehension they receive.’

Renowned reading researcher David Share (the self-teaching hypothesis) emphasized this point in a presentation a few weeks ago, referring to the importance of:

rapid, effortless word recognition that frees the reader to focus on comprehension.

This is why I had to provide my third-graders who lacked sufficient decoding skills additional decoding support in small groups, along with providing them whole-group strategy instruction to be applied to grade-level text, with the hope that once the decoding threshold was crossed, the strategy would be waiting for them on the other side.

Here’s how I wrote about one of my dyslexic third graders who was in both my first and second grade reading intervention groups prior to being a student in the third grade class I taught once a week as part of a job share:

One student in particular, who had strong vocabulary knowledge but was reading two years below grade level because she struggled so much with decoding, exemplified this need for support. Once she decoded a multisyllabic word—which was never an easy task—her vocabulary knowledge paved her way toward comprehension.

As for easy to learn, that would make an interesting discussion amongst those of us whose students do not have a robust relationship with language structures and features due to a variety of reasons, often related to insufficient opportunities to develop their language skills in both the home and the classroom. Of course, maybe we’re just flat out teaching it badly (more on this in Part 3), but comprehension strategy instruction has never felt either easy to teach or to learn.

Finally, there’s your run-of-the-mill mental strain and lack of student engagement, a teacher’s nemeses and constant companions in the classroom, year in and year out. Carl Hendrick recently wrote about ten trends in cognitive load theory research, citing interesting examples of the importance of reducing mental strain and increasing student engagement.

From Best of Both Worlds? Combining Physical and Mental Self-Management Strategies to Support Learning from Split-Attention Examples:

A few minutes spent modelling how to annotate and mentally “connect the dots” could make a real difference in how students handle complex material. The study doesn’t claim big gains either but reducing mental strain for the same result is a win, especially for struggling learners.

From: The Moderating Role of Interest in the Relationship between Perceived Task Difficulty and Invested Mental Effort:

Yes, students who are interested in a topic are more likely to put in the effort, but only when the material is within reach. When things get tough, interest alone isn’t enough. The implication? Basically, for difficult content, clear explanations, strategic scaffolding, and carefully sequenced instruction are more important than making content "exciting."

Just to recap: We’ve got some students who come to us with limited language experiences; some students who have not reached the decoding threshold; some students who are not engaged—and some students with all three profiles. For these different types of students, the tricks themselves can be quite tricky because the learning curve is so steep.

Foreground, Background—Middle Ground: If, as Daniel Willingham asserts, reading comprehension requires relating the sentences to one another and then relating these sentences to things we already know, what is the role for learning new information through reading? How many of those sentences whose relationships we’ve analyzed need to be related to things we already know in order to understand new information and lay the foundation for tackling the next text that contains information that we don’t already know?

In an EducationWeek interview, Kelly Cartwright, co-developer of The Active View of Reading, summarizes the tension between knowledge-building and strategy instruction like this:

We think about education or life in false dichotomies, because it’s easy to simplify thinking in that way. But it’s not a knowledge-or-strategies situation. Children cannot comprehend text if they don’t have the background knowledge from which to make meaning … but knowing what to do with your knowledge, and with a text to recruit that knowledge to help you comprehend, is also essential.

After examining the evidence, Daniel Willingham concludes:

(1) Teaching children strategies is definitely a good idea.

(2) The evidence is best for strategies that have been most thoroughly studied; the evidence for the less-studied strategies is inconclusive (not negative) and, therefore, there is not evidence that one strategy is superior to another.

(3) Strategies are learned quickly, and continued instruction and practice does not yield further benefits.

(4) Strategy instruction is unlikely to help students before they are in the third or fourth grade.

And he emphasizes:

Teaching reading strategies is a low-cost way to give developing readers a boost, but it should be a small part of a teacher’s job. Happily, students can learn them quickly and they are effective, but they appear to deliver a one-time boost. Acquiring a broad vocabulary and a rich base of background knowledge will yield more substantial and longer-term benefits.

I wish I shared Willingham’s glee over how easy it is to learn strategies. Based on my experiences, I believe we need to distinguish between learning strategies, practicing strategies, and applying strategies. Each time a student is asked to apply a strategy, they are also practicing it and becoming more adept at utilizing it. So when does practice stop and application begin?

Or—maybe the ineffectiveness of extensive practice is related to practicing a comprehension strategy on random, disconnected passages—like practicing shooting baskets rather than playing basketball. This isolated, controlled environment is different from learning and applying strategies as part of reading complex texts on related topics, something Natalie Wexler (The Knowledge Gap) has written extensively about over the last few years. In Why We're Teaching Reading Comprehension In A Way That Doesn't Work she warns against foregrounding strategy instruction by practicing a strategy divorced from knowledge-building instead of foregrounding complex text. She writes:

Rather than putting a difficult text in the foreground and modeling whatever strategies might help students extract its meaning, teachers put a strategy in the foreground and choose simple texts that lend themselves to demonstrating it, without regard to their topics.

But then we have this from Timothy Shanahan in Are We Teaching Reading Comprehension? Part II – 6 Things Every Teacher Should Know:

At this point, building knowledge, per se, should not count as reading comprehension instruction.

Of course, Natalie Wexler and other knowledge-building advocates aren’t saying that foregrounding a complex text is enough to impart knowledge, which reminds me of the importance of understanding the Simple View of Reading equation, how foregrounding only one factor—either decoding or language comprehension—isn’t enough to facilitate reading comprehension.

I don’t know who said it first, but I first heard the following statement from cognitive psychologist Kathy Rastle:

You can’t just put kids in a library and expect them to learn to read by osmosis.

Similarly, you can’t just immerse students in knowledge-rich texts and expect them to absorb all the information. The middle ground involves accessing complex text through strategy instruction that directly tackles the language in that text in all its glory—and guises. What may seem straightforward to us can seem like the gibberish of Jabberwocky to many of our students. So it’s left to us magicians to show our students how to pull rabbits out of their texts—over and over again.

Part III: The Effort of Explanation will take a closer look at strategy instruction that is evidence-based and how this instruction can support students in learning how to navigate complex text through the language that expresses it.

Always striving to make sense—please let me know when I fail.