Over the past year, I have begun private tutoring English, reading and math. I have discovered a curious challenge with two of my students: they are both elementary age boys who are strong visual learners and can read aloud smoothly and with expression. However, they make little or no connection to the meaning of the passage. How can this be?
My first thought is to the short term working memory. Is this child impaired? I will ask the child about the meaning of a simple word in the passage to be sure that he at least has a working vocabulary of the individual words. "What does 'pilot' mean?" He will look eager and hopeful like he has an idea, but then will slump back, lower his eyes and shrug, I don't know. Why is this? Is he lacking confidence in his first idea and second guessing himself out of it? Is it there but then gone because his memory can't hold onto it and his mind takes a sharp turn away from the first thought? My next idea is perhaps he really never has heard of a pilot before. How can this be true? So I ask him if he has heard the word before. Yes. Where? On TV? Yes. At an airport? Yes. But he still cannot tell me what the word means. My next thought is that he knows the meaning but he has no synonyms for it. So, even if he has a picture of a pilot in his head, he has no words to attach to it other than the one I have given him, pilot.
Where are the words in this child's head? Where do words come from? Why doesn't he have the word games and rich descriptions that other children enjoy?
Reading Comprehension grows, not from reading but from hearing language. Skill in comprehension grows in three ways. The first and most important way is listening comprehension. As a baby grows up, he or she hears television, parents talking, books read, and other sources of language going into their ears. As the child grows, their brain begins to make connections, associations and meanings with the words, phrases, idioms they hear. The begin to make inferences, draw conclusions, correctly sequence events in a story, predict outcomes, see the cause and effect relationships, and understand the main ideas and supporting details in the material that they are hearing. A school age child needs a steady stream of listening in order to develop the cognitive skills of language comprehension. This stream of language needs to be roughly about 3 years older than they are in order to form the listening vocabulary and comprehension skills needed. This level of input of language needs to move up in difficulty as the child grows and constantly be ahead of his other language development. For example, the infant needs to hear nursery rhymes, songs and baby talk before he or she begins to talk. A three year old needs to hear picture books and first readers, more complex songs and children's poems so that they are hearing more complex language and also they are building conceptual understanding of many many ideas. As the listening vocabulary and comprehension increases and the child's body of knowledge and concepts expands, they create a framework of brain hooks for future learning and comprehension. For example, the concept of a pilot will be firmly established well before the child can spell or read the word.
The second way in which comprehension skills develop is orally. Before a child can read with comprehension, he needs to be able to use his listening vocabulary to speak clearly. A child will use language orally at a lower academic level than his listening comprehension. For example, a child can hear and understand the book Curious George at age 4 but when retelling it to his mother aloud he will be using simpler and younger language to retell it. Having a child retell a story is extremely important. Why? He will take the risk of attempting to imitate the use of words that he has only heard. In the process of learning to retell stories or make oral arguments, he is practicing all of the skills needed for composition. He must invent content or come up the the ideas of what to say. He must decide which detail to begin with and must place the details sequentially in some meaningful order. He must use description, adjectives and adverbs, to bring the story to life and create visual images of his story. He must use sentences correctly, each having one main idea in each. He must use new vocabulary words. All of these are forming confidence in using language to speak and later to write as he sees the response of the listener to his clear or not so clear communication. He learns to make adjustments to his wording and organization when it is not achieving his objectives. I am delighted when I see young mothers recording their child's early words on Facebook. My mother asked me to call her when my kids (now in college) said cute things and she kept a book by the telephone and recorded all the wonderful words as they were growing up! What a treasure those books are for my kids today. Kids are not just concrete thinkers! They come up with some very profound and amazing original things.
The third way that children develop reading comprehension is reading text. Before learning to read, hopefully the child will have already practiced the comprehension part from hearing stories. He will already have a good vocabulary of words that he knows when he hears them. He will already know how stories work and how arguments work. The new skill is decoding symbols into sounds. As he sounds out a word using his new decoding skill, he "hears" the word and it triggers the memory of his listening or auditory vocabulary. Then you see it, the "Aha!" of recognition when he realizes that he KNOWS this word and understands it! This is magical for the child and the teacher! He is using his framework of brain hooks, his file folders of knowledge, his pathways of neurons of knowledge of words and concepts, to connect to this word on the page! He is on his way to adding reading books to his sources of input of new knowledge and skill.
Each of these three levels of activity must be ongoing throughout a child's education in order for a child to master college level reading comprehension one day. For each idea in a child's education, whether academic or real world, they must first hear it, then they need to speak about it and then they will be successful in reading about it. Only after the middle grades do we see children capable of picking up completely novel concepts from reading alone. When we do, we often see them lack the confidence to discuss these terms orally. In the average elementary education classroom, kids are not encouraged to speak enough about their learning. Research has shown that if a student can explain a new concept or skill to a classmate that their own understanding is improved to the point of true ownership.
In my tutoring, I like to read a passage to an elementary student, then have them explain it to me. Finally I have them read it to me. After this process, they can usually answer the reading comprehension questions. I do many other things, but this sequence seems to encourage the confidence that many of them lack in using words or concepts after only reading about them. More and more I am finding a dearth of background knowledge and a lack or oral expression. I can tell that these children will struggle with both reading comprehension and writing because of their lack of input. I suggest that the parents immediately allow the kids to start listening to audio books and other sources of listening. I also suggest that they have the students talk to them every day, retelling some event from their day or anything. If they student uses words incorrectly or doesn't make sense, ask the questions to get to the meaning.
In school, kids are not permitted to talk enough. Strategies such as peer to peer discussions increase the academic performance because the kids have to understand and explain the lesson as part of the activity. The teacher can quickly see who doesn't have it yet from just walking around and listening. Keeping this paradigm of the three levels in place using classically great literature, history and science topics skyrockets new readers from Kindergarten up to 6th or 7th grade level in just a few years.
