Pathways to Information: Accessing Knowledge by Leveraging Language (Part 4)

Constructing comprehension requires bricks and bridges: knowledge-building bricks embedded in content and the language that bridges the ideas they embody.

Part 4: Patterns of Language on Parade

Part 3: The Effort of Explanation emphasized the importance of requiring students to reconstruct knowledge in their own words because effortful elaboration helps clarify concepts. This effort involves language expression, both oral and written, which is used to coordinate meaning across sentences and paragraphs.

Baseball, Horseshoes, and Teaching: Like baseball, teaching is a game of failure—success interspersed with a fair amount of striking out. But like horseshoes, coming close to the target counts. If we can get our lessons to align with both reading science and learning science, the instructional changes—however incremental—can matter.

For example, I shared with a colleague who has a robust vocabulary program the research by Linnea Ehri (Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning, 2014) about the importance of connecting phonology, orthography, and semantics (sounds, letters, and meanings) in order to map words to memory. She makes the following recommendation:

Vocabulary learning is facilitated when spellings accompany pronunciations and meanings of new words to activate OM [orthographic mapping].

Fortunately, he was easily persuaded and simply added phonemic analysis to his instructional routine with a simple tweak, one that helps students acquire new vocabulary while also reinforcing how to decode multisyllabic words.

Listen to the word. Repeat what you hear. Spell the sounds you hear in each syllable.

As discussed in Part 2: Tricks of the Trade—or the Trade Itself, the challenge of decoding multisyllabic words directly impacts the ability to comprehend text, a condition described as the decoding threshold. But this is far from the only challenge, and as a reading specialist, I work with students who face multiple barriers to proficient reading.

To address some of these challenges, I’ve made my own changes, one of them influenced by the knowledge-building movement. I now emphasize informational text in my second grade intervention sessions so that my phonics instruction targets decoding impediments related to reading multisyllabic words within the context of disciplinary content. The decodable text my district adopted to align with the Common Core State Standards has made this possible with accessible (albeit challenging) informational text interspersed with more easily decoded stories. Here are the topics I can choose from—disconnected, sadly—but better than the fluff of the fictional pieces.

Native Americans, U.S. geography, natural resources, Civil War, laws, U.S. landmarks, money, fossils, planets, gravity, rocks and minerals, inventions, communication, sound, farm tools, extreme weather, energy, matter, penguins, animal habitats, germs, libraries

Accessing informational text is a good start when addressing knowledge gaps, but I have an even bigger challenge. Although I can use this text to practice decoding multisyllabic words, in addition to imparting new knowledge, some of my students really struggle with comprehension at the sentence level. If basic language comprehension at this simple level is a barrier, helping students comprehend text across sentences and paragraphs can seem insurmountable.

When I taught AP English literature to seniors, I thought that would be the most difficult teaching assignment I would have. Then, years later when I taught kindergarteners, I realized that teaching beginning reading was even harder. But both of these assignments paled in comparison to teaching third graders how to navigate a state exam that asks them to read two or more articles on one topic, extract important information, and synthesize a response that cites evidence from the articles—all of which requires the ability to comprehend across sentences and paragraphs.

I can confidently say that everything I needed to know about the challenges of developing foundational skills I learned teaching kindergarten. And everything I needed to know about the challenges of facilitating reading comprehension I learned over four years in this third grade class teaching the trifecta: foundational skills to students with deficits in decoding multisyllabic words, knowledge-building, and multi-paragraph writing. In this instructional environment, integrating literacy components was essential.

Instructional Simultaneity: Chapter 16 of Handbook of the Science of Early Literacy presents the concept of instructional simultaneity, whereby literacy components are taught in tandem to maximize instructional time. In Daniel Willingham’s 2006 article, which includes a chart listing various strategies, multiple strategy instruction (summarization, prediction, question generation, and clarification of confusing words or passages) has 38 studies and shows evidence of effectiveness. Although both summarization and question generation are also listed individually as being effective, prediction does not appear on the chart. However, we know we don’t need to adopt every strategy—just a few that are supported by research.

More importantly, we can simultaneously teach strategy instruction and language development to maximize instructional time along with boosting the impact of our instruction.

In his 2023 article on comprehension, Willingham notes:

Comprehension strategies are meant to get students only to a rather basic understanding of a text. Reading strategies that hone other abilities, such as analyzing arguments and comparing points of view within the text, lead to deeper or more specialized understandings. And it’s my belief that learners likely benefit from greater practice in these reading activities.

This statement makes an important distinction between a basic understanding of a text and deeper, more specialized understandings. But if applying well-chosen comprehension strategies that facilitate the former also promote the latter, then we’ve got ourselves a ballgame. Perhaps this simply means that comprehension strategies, like foundational skills, are necessary but not sufficient to secure a robust understanding of text. What’s also needed is facility with the intricacies of language.

We know we need wide reading to move from phonics to fluency; similarly, we need wide writing to move from a basic understanding of a text to a deeper one through the effort of explanation as discussed in Part 3.

As noted, summarization is a strategy with evidence of effectiveness. Is this strategy a tactic students can rely on to form a plan of action for tackling text, one that gives them a pathway to accessing the information by analyzing the arguments and comparing the points of view in the text? It’s not possible to compare arguments without an understanding of what each argument entails, which illustrates the value of instructional simultaneity. Comprehension strategies can unlock the language that embeds knowledge.

Here are Daniel Willingham’s three types of students featured in Part 2:

(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.

If we add a fourth type, students who can decode but need to learn the strategy and the structure of sentences and paragraphs, then we must make sure to foreground both knowledge-building and language development.

Catherine Snow’s Rand Corporation report, Reading for Understanding: Toward an R & D Program for Reading Comprehension (2002), contextualizes strategy instruction as follows:

The optimal balance enables students to learn that strategies are an important means for understanding but are not the main point of reading activities. The main purposes for reading are gaining meaning and gaining knowledge . . . Especially when teaching reading in the content areas, teachers should carefully plan how much material to cover on a particular topic. Factors they should consider when making judgments about the scope of coverage include concept complexity, specialized vocabulary, and the depth of understanding they expect students to achieve. They should teach comprehension strategies that foster deep understanding of relevant content matter and give students ample opportunities to employ them.

As Part 1: Types of Knowledge emphasized, we want students to have 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. Can we accomplish this retrieval by utilizing a few functional tools in our toolbox that we are calling comprehension strategies: asking/answering questions, textual analysis, and summarizing/synthesizing? Can these processes fall under the umbrella of strategy instruction—deliberate, sustained, and multi-dimensional—representative of something very different from the fleeting strategy-of-the-week skill development we’ve subjected our students to in the past?

Sentence Signals—and Other Syntactic Competencies: In What Is Important to Measure in Sentence-Level Language Comprehension? (2024), the authors note the importance of recognizing key syntactic information in order to make connections between ideas within the text. They write:

A reader’s ability to comprehend information at the sentence level is important to their ability to construct an appropriate text base in the first place (Kintsch, 2013). An inability to recognize key syntactic information may prevent a reader from making the appropriate connections between ideas within the text. Connectives are signposts in text that explicitly describe the relationship between ideas in the text (Cain & Nash, 2011; McNamara et al., 2014) and may support inference generation, especially for low knowledge readers (Crosson & Lesaux, 2013). Connectives include temporal (e.g., before), additive (e.g., fortunately), causal (e.g., due to), and adversative (e.g., although). Knowledge of these discourse markers represents an important linguistic skill in the comprehension of academic texts (Uccelli et al., 2015).

The authors also provide the following example from the Syntactic Knowledge Task where students are asked to choose the correct sentence connection.

Rising air cools and becomes a liquid. {As a result, But, However}, it begins to condense and form clouds . . . CI [Construction-Integration] Theory suggests that readers create a mental representation of the text by activating prior knowledge regarding evaporation or make a logical inference that cloud formation is the effect of atmospheric condensation, rather than something that occurs despite it.

This crucial point about understanding complex language is also discussed in Comprehending Comprehension: Is Knowledge Enough (2025). Trina Spencer and Doug Petersen emphasize the importance of developing language, how students must be taught language skills that help them access the knowledge in the text. They ask: What's doable for teachers? This echoes Robert Pondiscio's common sense conclusion:

The job has to be doable by the teachers we have—not the teachers we wish we had.

My teacher-translator tells me these educators are well-aware that we have to work with what your average teacher (whom Pondiscio reminds us is a mere mortal) can be reasonably expected to do to help students acquire all the skills in the upper strands of Scarborough’s Reading Rope, including—in addition to background knowledge—vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy concepts. Spencer and Petersen emphasize the following points (paraphrased):

• A lot of our knowledge is acquired and expressed through language; focusing on knowledge alone will be insufficient.

• Use content to teach language (e.g., vocabulary, sentence structures, text discourse) so that the knowledge comes with minimal additional effort.

• Good curricula should include both what we teach and how we teach it.

• Teach students language and strategies for acquiring knowledge independently, then give them many opportunities to apply the strategies across content.

• Strategy instruction without also teaching language will not lead to meaningful comprehension.

• Once students have strong language and can apply strategies, their verbal reasoning helps them figure out how new knowledge relates to what they know.

These points are neatly summarized in Trina Spencer’s comment in the webinar Background Knowledge and Vocabulary: Their Roles in Building Language Comprehension where she states:

If we actually teach the patterns of language—the content comes for free. And the patterns of language are what’s transportable across content.

In this week’s The Literacy View podcast Doug Peterson reminds us:

What we’re really trying to do is teach children to use and understand complex language early on.

A recent study, The Frequency of Informational Text Read-Alouds in Kindergarten and its Association with Students’ Vocabulary and Knowledge Development (2025), explains the challenges of knowledge-building due to the complexity of concepts in informational texts as well as the complexity of the texts themselves.

The frequency of informational text read-alouds did not significantly correlate with students’ vocabulary and knowledge gains . . . One significant challenge is the complexity of concepts often presented in informational texts (Hoffman et al., 2015), which makes it difficult for kindergarten teachers to support students’ comprehension of both the concepts and the texts.

This simultaneous support for accessing both the concepts conveyed in knowledge-rich texts and developing an understanding of the means of that conveyance—the language that is transportable—necessitates careful management of lessons. The authors note:

The current instructional practices during these read-alouds may not be sufficient to effectively support students’ learning in these areas.

This is not surprising given the demands inherent in both teaching and learning complex grade-level texts, as well as the demands of decision-making within the course of a lesson, the contingent scaffolding discussed in Part 1.

Here’s an example of what we’re up against. In Introduction to the Special Issue: Mechanisms of Variation in Reading Comprehension: Processes and Products (Scientific Studies in Reading, 2021), Julie A. Van Dyke notes that it’s not just unfamiliar vocabulary that confounds comprehension but complex syntactic and discourse structures as well.

The growing awareness of the importance of including expository texts in studies of reading comprehension (e.g., Currie et al., Citation2021) is a move in the right direction, as this is where syntactic competencies are stressed the most. These texts are not only more difficult because of their unfamiliar vocabulary, but they contain much more complex syntactic and discourse structures. If the syntactic and general cognitive (e.g., executive function, memory retrieval) skills necessary to process them were routinely assessed, they would likely contribute just as significantly as vocabulary knowledge.

Paving Common Ground: In Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival the authors rightly emphasize the importance of background knowledge but are perhaps too categorical (and cavalier?) in concluding that background knowledge activation is the only goal of comprehension strategies. They state:

The goal of comprehension strategies is to activate students’ background knowledge. However, if the relevant background knowledge is lacking, conscious comprehension strategies cannot activate it. Recent research has highlighted that the effects of reading strategy instruction are therefore significantly strengthened by instruction in background knowledge (Peng et al., 2023), and that the relation between knowledge and reading is indeed bidirectional and positive throughout the elementary years: in other words ‘knowledge begets reading, which begets knowledge’ (Hwang et al., 2023).

However, if we are using the term comprehension strategies more broadly to also include language processing strategies that teach students to recognize the benefit of coordinating meaning across sentences and paragraphs, as Daniel Willingham explained, we have broadened the skill to include more than just activating background knowledge. We are also activating knowledge of language and text structures, the importance of which Spencer and Petersen unequivocally emphasize.

If this assertion in The Knowledge Revival is correct and conscious comprehension strategies cannot activate background knowledge, they can at the very least activate knowledge of how words work in sentences, which can facilitate knowledge acquisition to be applied at the next reading opportunity in the form of background knowledge. This see-sawing between knowledge-building and strategy instruction can perhaps be stabilized through a deliberate union of the two. As Kelly Cartwright explained:

knowing what to do with your knowledge, and with a text to recruit that knowledge to help you comprehend, is also essential.

Similarly, Natalie Wexler (The Knowledge Gap), who introduced many of us to the pitfalls related to ineffective comprehension strategy instruction, reminds us:

Written language is more complex than oral language in terms of its vocabulary and sentence structure, and students need to become familiar with that complexity if they’re going to become proficient readers.

Here are some answers to the Part 1 questions:

• On Decision-making: Instructional constraint guides lesson planning through an understanding of the barriers to comprehension related to cognitive load, decoding deficits, and a lack of familiarity with sentence, paragraph, and text structure. A reminder from Blake Harvard (Do I Have Your Attention?): Without knowledge of human cognitive processes, instructional design is blind. (Part 1)

• On Action Plans: Determining importance and conveying that importance to others in writing gives students a plan of action that they can apply to any text. This tactic for tackling complex text improves language comprehension through a careful examination of the assertions in the text, which in turn facilitates knowledge acquisition. (Part 2)

• On Strategic Knowledge/Content Knowledge: Overall, these tactics should reflect high-utility comprehension strategies that facilitate analyzing and responding to text, allowing students to access information and reconstruct knowledge in their own words, strengthening neural pathways through the effort of explanation. (Part 3)

• On Content Knowledge/Language Structures: Content knowledge can’t be extracted from text unless students have both sufficient decoding skills and language comprehension skills, and the patterns of language are what’s transportable across content. (Part 4)

As a child, I remember being confused by three names: Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, and Luther Burbank. But since I was only in elementary school, this confusion was inconsequential. The fact that these three people were even part of any conversation in my head shows me that I was subconsciously accumulating background knowledge that I could solidify as my schooling progressed. My question: What is the best way to teach children to acquire knowledge-building details to help them separate the clerics from the civil rights activists from the botanists?

For the past few years, the knowledge-building movement has rained on the strategy-instruction parade, when what it should have done was fire the parade marshal and recruit a well-synchronized marching band, one that was in step with deploying effective strategies to unlock language and release information.

The goal of reading is comprehension, which is the outcome of understanding the language used to express facts and concepts in complex grade-level texts. Gaining access to this knowledge through systematic, explicit, and well-researched strategy instruction applied to these knowledge-rich texts keeps kids marching along the pathway to accessing and retaining information. This instructional know-how underpins decision-making and allows teachers to direct traffic while guiding students toward their destination: making meaning.

Instead of undermining comprehension strategy instruction by setting up No Strategies Allowed signs and other roadblocks to this instruction—or recommending knowledge-building detours to bypass it—we needed to determine the strategies that offer the most direct route to accessing information and use these strategies to clear a path for students to follow.

To accomplish this, strategy instruction needed a rehabilitation tour—not a burial march. There's still time to repurpose a fully-functioning strategy float for this parade—and then swiftly strike up the band.

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