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The reason that reading ability is the heart of the matter is that reading ability correlates with learning and communication ability. Reading proficiency isn’t in and of itself the magic key to competence. It’s what reading enables us to learn and to do that is critical. In the information age, the key to economic and political achievement is the ability to gain new knowledge rapidly through reading and listening.
Students’ scores in reading comprehension are consistently associated with their subsequent school grades and their later economic success.
Under our current educational methods, a child’s reading in second grade reliably predicts that child’s academic performance in eleventh grade, quite irrespective of his or her native talent and diligence.
Learning how to read in the first sense—decoding through phonics—does not guarantee learning how to read in the second sense—comprehending the meaning of what is read. To become a good comprehender, a child needs a great deal of knowledge.
But nobody advocates rote learning of disconnected facts.
What they did advocate was the systematic acquisition of broad knowledge.
the mistaken dogma that reading is a formal skill that can be transferred from one task to another regardless of subject matter.
For children to make substantial progress in reading, they must make early and substantial progress in knowledge.
While it is true that proficient reading and critical thinking are allpurpose abilities, they are not content-independent, formal skills at all but are always based on concrete, relevant knowledge and cannot be exercised apart from what psychologists call “domain-specific” knowledge.
The only thing that transforms reading skill and critical thinking skill into general all-purpose abilities is a person’s possession of general, all-purpose knowledge.20
The idea that reading skill is largely a set of general-purpose maneuvers that can be applied to any and all texts is one of the main barriers to our students’ achievement in reading.
They take up time that could be devoted to gaining general knowledge, which is the central requisite for high reading skill.
Cognitive scientists agree that reading comprehension requires prior “domain-specific” knowledge about the things that a text refers to, and that understanding the text consists of integrating this prior knowledge with the words in order to form a “situation model.”
the only way to improve scores in reading comprehension and to narrow the reading gap between groups is systematically to provide children with the wide-ranging, specific background knowledge they need to comprehend what they read.
researchers have shown that the best and fastest way to teach decoding is through persistent, explicit instruction, a little at a time, starting no later than kindergarten.
the present reality has not conformed to the old assumption that good comprehension follows automatically from gaining a good early start in decoding.
After mastering decoding, a student who reads widely can indeed, under the right circumstances, gain greater knowledge and thence better reading comprehension. But such gains will occur only if the student already knows enough to comprehend the meaning of what he or she is decoding!
We need to see the reading comprehension problem for what it primarily is—a knowledge problem.
At the youngest ages, two through seven, long before children can read as well as they can listen, progress in language occurs chiefly through listening and talking, not through reading and writing. But because we have thought of reading and writing as separate from listening and talking, we have tended to spend large amounts of time—too much time—on the simple cat-in-the-hat kinds of written material that young children are able to read and understand for themselves. We have failed to focus effectively on the knowledge of both language and the world that children can gain in those years only
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If we do not spend large amounts of time reading aloud and discussing challenging material with children—material that is well beyond their ability to decode with understanding—we miss a critical opportunity to increase their knowledge of language and of the world—the kind of knowledge that will prove decisive for reading in later years.
listening ability in grade two reliably forecasts reading ability in grade five.
proficient reading and proficient listening both depend on an ability to comprehend language,
Every gain in oral speech, in knowledge and in vocabulary and in the conventions of formal discourse, that children make in kindergarten or first grade is ultimately a gain in reading comprehension,
If children’s progress in language and knowledge is held hostage to their progress in decoding, their ability to read with comprehension will be unnecessarily retarded.
It is precisely for the sake of reading and writing that we need to place a great deal of emphasis in the early grades on nonwritten, oral activities—on adults reading aloud coherent and challenging material, on discussing it, on having children elaborate on these materials.
In the classroom, the teacher can and should ask children frequently to make formal prepared and unprepared presentations to the class.
It is in early language learning that the Matthew effect begins to take hold. Those who know many words and who possess the background knowledge to comprehend what they mean will learn more words and world knowledge later on, while those who know few words in early grades fall further and further behind in later grades.
Comprehension is not a skill that automatically grows into an ability to cope with complex materials once a child has been given a start with simple ones.
general reading skill applies only to texts that are consciously directed to a general audience within a definite speech community.
If we want to measure general reading ability on a test, we must include passages that sample a person’s general knowledge of several kinds of subjects.
General reading comprehension ability is much more than comprehension strategies; it requires a definite range of general knowledge.
Researchers have discovered that what the text implies but doesn’t say is a necessary part of its understood meaning. In fact, what the text doesn’t say often far exceeds what it says.
Comprehension skill cannot be automatically transferred from one text to another, because the skill of comprehension is basically the skill of filling in enough of what has been left unsaid—that is, filling in enough blanks—to make sense of the text.
for if there is indeed knowledge that all children must have if they are to become proficient readers in our speech community, then it is our duty to determine what that knowledge is and show why it is needed.
We don’t need to teach them the things that writers directly explain; we need to teach them what writers take for granted and do not explain.
Inference is filling in a blank in the text that we need to fill in to understand it. But filling in a blank is not a formal skill; it is not supplying a missing formal operation. It is supplying a missing substance.
It is not mainly comprehension strategies that young children lack in comprehending texts but knowledge—knowledge of formal language conventions and knowledge of the world.
order to discuss language efficiently, teachers and parents need to name the parts of speech and a few other terms, like subject, predicate, direct object, indirect object, prepositional phrase, singular, plural, and agreement.
If learning the print code is critical to children’s reading and writing ability, so is having an adequate vocabulary.
we learn words up to four times faster in a familiar than in an unfamiliar context.
the biggest contribution to the size of any person’s vocabulary must come from the printed page (whether it is heard or read), because print uses a greater number of different words than everyday oral speech does.19 Since children in early grades can’t read these materials effectively for themselves, they should be read to. Reading aloud to very young children is one of the main agents of their vocabulary progress.
The consensus of all researchers is that indirect, implicit learning is by far the main mode of increasing one’s vocabulary.
Researchers have found that we need multiple exposures to a word in multiple contexts to start getting a secure sense of its overtones and range.
The vocabulary gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students widens the longer they stay in our schools.
vocabulary heard in school is potentially richer than the vocabulary heard outside school. Oral speech tends to use a smaller vocabulary than written speech.
A universal ability of citizens to read newspapers or their equivalent with understanding is the essence of democracy.
Reading achievement will not advance significantly until schools recognize and act on the fact that it depends on the possession of a broad but definable range of diverse knowledge.
The effective teaching of reading will require schools to teach the diverse, enabling knowledge that reading requires.
What are the best ways to use school time productively, so we bring students from all social backgrounds to proficiency in reading and writing?
What is the most effective way to foster vocabulary gain?
