Raising Kids Who Read Read online

  The Indirect Route

  I know some parents wouldn’t feel comfortable trying to get their teen to practice reading; how well that’s going to work obviously depends on your relationship and your history with your child. You can also try an indirect method with reading activities that demand less of her and are harder to say no to. These ideas won’t work for all families, but maybe one or two would work for yours.

  You could try a family reading time once a week, in which each person reads silently together. Pitch it as a weekly time away from screens and with one another. If your child tries to show you that she doesn’t have to play along (perhaps by selecting baby books or catalogues), ignore it. She may actually be selecting books from early childhood both because she remembers them fondly and because they are easy to read. For this reason, don’t be quick to give away books your child has outgrown.

  A related idea is to have the whole family listen together to an audiobook of mutual interest—and from there perhaps to one family member reading aloud to the others. Obviously the stated goal is not to practice reading. The motivation is that reading is pleasurable, spending time together as a family is pleasurable, and this is a way to do both. Time is always a problem, but even if you start with just fifteen minutes each week, that’s more than nothing, and the hope is that an interesting book will prompt some sessions to go longer. Needless to say, it’s a good idea to start with the most appealing book you can think of (figure 8.5). More on that in chapter 10.

  Figure 8.5. Charles Dickens reading aloud to his daughters. If you institute family read-alouds, you might want to make things a bit less formal.

  Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charles_Dickens_with_his_two_daughters_by_Mason_&_Co_%28Robert_Hindry_Mason%29.jpg.

  You can also begin visits to the library even if you’ve never gotten into this habit before. If your child doesn’t want to go, tell him you need to go, and say that the most convenient time for you is during a trip to take him somewhere he needs to go.

  It’s true that these reading scenarios are pretty contrived. You should also be on the lookout for times that it’s logical for your child to read. If there is a younger sibling in the house, that child should be read to: the older child might take that on. (She might also read to the children of friends who visit.) Such reading is a nice chance for your child to revisit favorites from childhood and perhaps awaken memories of reading that are more pleasant than the recent ones.

  I find good opportunities for my children to read when one of them wants something. When our daughter wanted an aquarium, my wife and I said, “Okay, if you’re going to take care of it, you have to learn about them.” So she got a book and read up on aquaria. The same argument can be made for nearly anything: a tree house, a green belt in karate, or a driver’s license.

  A rather sneaky motivator is this implicit bargain: “if my child is reading, I will do my utmost not to interrupt him.” That sounds natural, but if the principle extends to moments where you would typically ask the child’s help around the house, then it could become a useful motivator. Of course, it is essential that you not make this bargain explicit. It will be turned down, or you will end up quibbling about what sort of reading material “counts” or whether the chores were invented so as to persuade the child to read. If you leave it unstated, it may be a while before your child puts together what’s going on, and that leaves you with much better options for how to implement it.

  For some students, a forceful external motivation to improve their reading pops up unexpectedly. I once met a high schooler who was an avid baseball player. Sophomore year he made varsity but not first string, and he concluded he probably could not make a living as a player. He started to think about coaching or perhaps working in the front office of a minor league team. He did some research and learned he was much more likely to get a job with a degree in sports management. More or less overnight he became keenly interested in academic work so he could go to college. He realized that some of the struggle was getting through his textbooks, so he began to work on his reading.

  Digital Difference

  If your child is an uncertain reader, you might wonder whether extensive experience with digital media is somehow impoverishing her reading. There’s little indication that reading on a screen is substantially different from reading on paper.

  Research does show that the way a book is put on the screen can affect comprehension, but the effects are relatively modest. For example, comprehension is better if you navigate a book by flipping virtual pages, compared to scrolling. And clickable links (hyperlinks) incur a cost to comprehension even if you don’t click them. Because you can see that they are clickable, you still need to make a decision about whether to click. That draws on your attention and so carries a cost to comprehension. But most of these effects are small, so if you’re wondering whether your child would enjoy reading more on an e-reader (or whether reading on such a device is frustrating him), I’d say “probably not.”

  There is one qualification to that conclusion. If your child’s school is considering moving to electronic textbooks, be at least a little wary. Publishers are working to improve electronic textbooks, but with the current offerings, the research is pretty consistently negative. Comprehension is about the same as when reading on paper, but reading is less efficient. It takes longer to read electronic textbooks, and it feels more effortful. Quite consistently, a majority of students who have used electronic textbooks say they would rather use paper. The problem is probably not due to greater difficulty decoding an electronic book; the problem is that reading for pleasure is different from reading for school. The information is structured differently, it’s more complex, and you’re reading it to learn and remember it, not just to enjoy it.

  This greater complexity and the demand that students do more with textbooks characterize the reading challenges that begin in upper elementary school. In the next chapter, we turn out attention to these complications.

  Keeping It Simple Summary

  At School

  Practice reading to develop fluency.

  Strategies like repeated reading or the teacher modeling prosodic reading may help, but the research support is tenuous.

  At Home

  Encourage reading practice for the child who is a halting reader (though not dyslexic).

  If direct practice seems unworkable, look for ways that reading can logically creep into your child’s day.

  Notes

  “it also helps with the essential but less glamorous donkey work of comprehension”: Carlson (2009).

  “‘the skull is like a little auditorium’”: Rehm (2013).

  “it is the development of prosody, and not reading rate itself, that leads to the boost in reading comprehension associated with fluency”: Veenendaal, Groen, and Verhoeven (2014).

  “the self-teaching hypothesis”: Share (1995).

  “based on practice distributed over several years”: Grainger, Lété, Bertand, Dufau, and Ziegler (2012).

  “The more frequently she encounters a word, the richer your knowledge of what it looks like.”: Arciuli and Simpson (2012); Kessler (2009).

  “The main mechanism to develop fluency is reading.”: Collins and Levy (2008); Ehri (2008).

  “national tests indicate only about half of kids have reached desired levels of fluency by fourth grade”: Daane, Campbell, Grigg, Goodman, and Oranje (2005).

  “explicit spelling instruction seems to improve fluency”: Shanahan and Lomax (1986).

  “A second technique that can help students develop fluency is for the teacher to model reading with prosody.”: See, for example, Dowhower (1989).

  “A third technique to develop fluency is repeated reading.” Samuels (1979).

  “The research evidence for these techniques is not terribly strong”: Breznitz and Share (1992); Fleisher, Jenkins, and Pany (1979); Tan and Nicholson (1997).

  “comprehension is better if you navigate a book by flipping virtual pages
, compared to scrolling”: Sanchez and Wiley (2009).

  “clickable links (hyperlinks) incur a cost to comprehension”: DeStefano and LeFevre (2007).

  “Comprehension is about the same as when reading on paper, but reading is less efficient.”: Connell, Bayliss, and Farmer (2012); Daniel and Woody (2013); Rockinson-Szapkiw, Courduff, Carter, and Bennett (2013); Schugar, Schugar, and Penny (2011).

  “It takes longer to read electronic textbooks, and it feels more effortful.”: Ackerman and Goldsmith (2011); Ackerman and Lauterman (2012); Connell et al. (2012); Daniel and Woody (2013).

  “reading for pleasure is different from reading for school”: For more on how reading for pleasure is different from reading for schools as it applies to e-textbooks, see Daniel and Willingham (2012).

  Chapter 9

  Working with More Complex Texts

  The truism has it that children “first learn to read, and then read to learn.” Your third grader can decode, so presumably it’s time to “read to learn.” That catchphrase is a bit deceptive however, as it simplifies what is actually a quite serious increase in the expectations for comprehension.

  What’s Happening at School

  “Read to learn” makes comprehension sound so straightforward, but by this point, you know that comprehension rests on three factors:

  The reader must know the definitions of most of the words used in the text.

  The reader must be able to assign syntactic roles to sentences, which could be difficult if they are long or if the syntax is convoluted.

  Writers inevitably omit some information that’s needed to relate sentences to one another. The reader must have relevant background knowledge to fill these gaps.

  Note that all three are characteristics of either the text or of the reader. That is, a writer can make a text more comprehensible by using simple vocabulary and straightforward syntax, and by assuming little background knowledge on the part of the reader. If the writer doesn’t do these things, the reader is not completely defenseless. The reader can look up words she doesn’t know, she can expend more mental effort to untangle difficult syntax, and (although this one is tougher) she can try to find the knowledge that’s necessary to make appropriate inferences. But before the reader will do that extra work, she must first recognize, “Hey, I don’t understand this.”

  Noticing When Comprehension Fails

  How hard can it be to perceive that you don’t understand what you’re reading? Students are not as good at this work as you might think. They notice if a word is not in their vocabulary. They notice if they don’t understand the syntax of a sentence. But they don’t always connect the meaning of sentences, and they don’t notice that they fail to do so. That’s especially true of poor readers, who are satisfied with a fairly minimal understanding of a text; when something goes wrong with their comprehension, they often don’t try to solve the problem. It’s not that they are unable to make appropriate inferences. Have them watch an engrossing movie, for example, and they will draw inferences to understand each scene and will think about how scenes fit together so they can follow the plot. But when they read, they figure that if they know most of the words and understand individual sentences, then they are doing their job (figure 9.1).

  Figure 9.1. Movies require complex inferences. A ten-year-old who can follow a complex movie plot should be able to read a comparably complex text, provided he can decode well.

  Source: © Rach via Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/vagueonthehow/3774991334/in/photolist-54YrBY-4ZfWpn-51Cnrk-4ZtVhj-512Aiu-4Xxhk2–4XhLcn-4XR7vG-51gwnW-5j2jvc-4XQWws-5kWw1p-56UHcC-6yGW7e-4SiUyg-56QwCk-56UE4A-56QC1i-bsLKHh-9RptqD-4YDHmd-GENpu-5pec4v-68sUVG-9MwpGD-7rVXe8–6B9Cmm-2mUFw8–6KzPpu-6KVGw-5pZtEH-jRZ6Y6-ifXqaC-ipa6hz-4VFvcT-2gHAQR-8UFRXk-9xFA2W-6QLQeF-8MaJJT-8f9EeK-93t1mC-7fBLn-6KVGx-2jkwer-8WNwyv-2eoXoy-oujHCq-hNfG1L-otTJio.

  I know it seems strange and the research showing this phenomenon would almost be funny if not for the pathos. For example, in one experiment, sixth graders were asked to read essays at the request of an experimenter who told them she needed help to make the essays clearer for children. The essays contained ideas that contradicted one another. Sometimes the contradictions were subtle, as in this example:

  “There is absolutely no light at the bottom of the ocean. Some fish that live at the bottom of the ocean know their food by color. They will only eat red fungus.”

  In other essays, the contradiction was made very explicit:

  “Fish must have light in order to see. There is absolutely no light at the bottom of the ocean. It is pitch black down there. When it is that dark the fish cannot see anything. They cannot even see colors. Some fish that live at the bottom of the ocean can see the color of their food; that is how they know what to eat.”

  Remarkably, when the error was subtle, sixth graders noticed it no more than 10 percent of the time. Even when it was made terribly obvious, no more than half noticed it.

  Reading Comprehension Strategies

  What would happen if you told students, “Hey, you should really try to tie the meaning of sentences together?” And while we’re at it, we can tell them that their background knowledge will be helpful in making those connections and that they must evaluate whether the connections they are drawing seem to make sense. These are the core ideas behind reading comprehension strategies, a mainstay of reading education in upper elementary school and beyond. You don’t just tell students to “tie the meaning of sentences together,” because that’s a bit vague. Instead you give them more concrete tasks—tasks that can’t be completed unless you connect the sentences.

  Here’s a list of commonly taught reading comprehension strategies. (You won’t be quizzed on them, so feel free to skim.)

  Comprehension monitoring. Readers are taught to become aware of when they do not understand, for example, by describing what exactly is causing them difficulty.

  Listening actively. Students learn to think critically as they listen and to appreciate that listening involves understanding a message from the speaker.

  Prior knowledge. Students are encouraged to apply what they know from their own lives to the text or to consider the theme of the text before reading it.

  Vocabulary-comprehension relationship. Students are encouraged to use background knowledge (as well as textual clues) to make educated guesses about the meaning of unfamiliar words.

  Graphic organizer. Students learn how to make graphic representations of texts, for example, story maps.

  Question answering. After students read a text, the teacher poses questions that emphasize the information students should have obtained from the text.

  Question generation. Students are taught to generate their own questions as they read, with the goal of summarizing major themes of the text.

  Summarization. Students are taught techniques of summarizing (e.g., deleting redundant information) and choosing a topic sentence for the main idea.

  Mental imagery. Students are instructed to create a mental visual image based on the text.

  Cooperative learning. Students enact comprehension strategies—for example, prediction and summarization—in small groups rather than with the teacher.

  Story structure. Students are taught the typical structure of a story, and learn how to create a story map.

  Note that these reading comprehension strategies encourage students to do exactly what we said is required for comprehension. Strategies 1 and 2 are designed to get students monitoring their comprehension. Strategies 3 and 4 are meant to get students to relate their prior knowledge to what they read. And strategies 5 through 11 require relating sentences in the text to one another.

  If you’re an experienced reader, these strategies may seem like unnecessary complications (figure 9.2). Nevertheless, teaching these strategies to students is supported by research. Here’s the way a typical experiment works. You administer a reading test to some students, say, fourth graders. Then you teach them a reading comprehension strategy. Most often, you wouldn’t teach
them just one: you’d teach a combination of perhaps three. Over the course of a few weeks, you’d have a number of sessions (from as few as ten to as many as fifty or more) in which you’d model how to use the strategies and the students would practice. The sessions might be daily or a few times per week. At the end of the experiment you would administer a reading test again and see whether comprehension has improved. (You’d compare the improvement to a control group of students who were not taught the strategy.)

  Figure 9.2. Do adults use reading strategies? Who sits down at the breakfast table and thinks, “Ah, here’s a headline about Ukraine. Let me activate my background knowledge about Eastern Europe in preparation to read this article”? Of course, it’s possible that I used to use these strategies, but after years of reading, they’ve become automatic and I don’t notice that I use them.

  Source: © Daniel Willingham.

  Many studies show that teaching strategies improves reading comprehension, and the gains are by no means trivial. The exact size of the boost is complicated to calculate, but even the low estimates have this relatively brief intervention—as short as a few weeks—moving a child reading at the 50th percentile up to the 64th percentile.a

  A Little Is Enough

  The documented benefit of reading comprehension strategy instruction is impressive given its modest cost, yet this instruction is easy to overdo. Teaching reading strategies does work, but the benefit comes after just a few sessions, and it doesn’t get any bigger with more practice.