I want to pause in the phrase, “reading comprehension” in an attempt to consider what it even means to understand what we read. Despite what I, for many years, believed, we are learning to read all the time. Understanding words and their myriad connections to each other and the outside world is a lifelong skill.
In many ways we are always uncovering what the implications of reading. Texts and ways that reading moves through our daily lives is constantly changing, whether it be through books or social media. What it means to “understand” and “to read,” are vastly complex subjects. So in an attempt to not completely disassemble reality in a single blog post, destabilizing myself, and possibly you, in the process, I will keep the concept of “reading comprehension” to three levels: before, during, and grown up. In this blog post I speak to all of you as teachers, whether you are caregivers or parents. Know that when I say “teacher” I am speaking to your teacher-self.
The realization that a person can read is like witnessing a kind of transcendence. It is as if the child (or person) have discovered a key to something ancient, and a door they had always known was there, opens, and it leads to miraculous and mysterious places. And they have. They are now able to move through time in a profound way, speaking to the dead, and imagine complex and glorious worlds of imagination. And a new reader can sense this immediately.
But this exciting realization is only the beginning.
Soon characters in books grow large and unwieldy. A slew of impossible vocabulary rules and rule changes begin to raise their ugly heads. And then, of course, writing can be dull, not grammatically correct, and prove useless to the reader at their stage. Reading a book that one does not connect with, whether it is because of the writing, or the fact that they are just not interested in the subject matter, can easily make a student believe there is something wrong with them as a reader. The writer, their experience, and time period they wrote in, becomes invisible behind the language, making the disconnect more of a disorientation than a difference.
Which is why, as teachers, we must initially promote patience and curiosity when faced with challenging texts. At every level, choose books with purpose. But let in the new, let the students choose too. Create a living library, breathing with stories. Patience and purpose are keys to opening out from the initial struggle after a student learns to read words.
The culture and histories that a reader grows up in impacts how they will work with text when they begin to read. So the teacher must observe how the student engages with books, and notice where their interests lie in relation to engaging with letters and stories, but also where their interests lie outside of reading and books. So when a student picks up their first book the teacher knows the child, and is ready to work with them as they read the books.
A new reader begins to identify letters and their rules, weaving sounds together to discover words. OW, EA, IGH then become READ, and COW, and NIGHT. But once those words are formed, they become much more than the letters themselves, the word “night” may immediately become dark and full of stars with a chorus of crickets. This is where reading comprehension begins: NIGHT leads to COW leads to SLEEP and the letters begin to reveal a scene.
But what scene? The reader assembling these words already has a history of oral language, and experience. The cow that they see comes from somewhere in their minds, and so social, contextual, and cultural experiences begin to come into focus and illustrate the link between language and life for the reader. Because language is not the words themselves. It is always what they mean that is the most important. Whatever relationship the reader has with night and cows, will define their understanding and help to provide connections to their reading experience going forward.
This form of reading comprehension is known as the Schema Theory, which was conceived in psychology by Jean Piaget and later Frederic Bartlett. The theory states that the reader is implicated within the text, making it so that each group of people with cultural, social, professional, or any number of backgrounds will inherently understand texts differently.
Of course, there is a local and generational understanding as well. The reader comes from a specific place, time period, or culture, which may define, say, “night” or “sleep”, in different ways. As the reader begins to tackle more books, the connections between the books will link to their lives, which is where the theory of “Formalism” comes into play. Genre, form, and structure become important for the student reader to understand how to approach what they are reading. While it is important to define where the book stands in relation to reality and context, how the text is to be approached is important at an early/middle range of reading. So the student knows that the author’s purpose is to convince them to buy cakes that look like little shoes, or that they are trying to teach the student about the moon based on the translated research of crows. This is the beginning of analytics, and must also be swiftly unlearned as the reader grows.
Writing will never fall in line, it is magical and mystical, and it will break all the rules.
Which brings me to an “advanced” reading practice, which is your, the teacher’s, process. And where reading becomes an engaged process of intentional dedication to passion, to committing to your own child self, and reading those things that raise you up.
The writer gives a shattered picture of words and images. It is the onus of the reader, whoever they may be, to assemble the picture in a meaningful way. To learn to live with and through it. These texts are magical doorways to other worlds. They are shared dreams. The child is a reader of what they choose to read, nothing more and nothing less. And the teacher creates the initial feeling of abundance and care around the student’s imagination by providing books with love, and facilitating the student’s individual interests.
So, you, teacher, find your own child too. Remember what you love to read to become a model for how engagement with writing has the ability to transform the world.
Here’s some more on the subject:
Madeline L’Engle: Dare to Be Creative
In summation: Neil Gaiman’s thoughts on other people’s thoughts on reading
Bending Tree Education 