Are We Spending Too Much Time Teaching Reading Comprehension?

In this Teachers College Record article, Daniel Willingham and Gail Lovette make a startling assertion: the most important reading comprehension skills can be learned quite quickly, and continuing to spend a lot of time teaching them is not a good use of precious classroom time. Here’s their argument.

After students learn to decode, there are three reasons they might fail to understand what they’re reading:

• They don’t know the meaning of some words.
• They don’t notice that they’re not understanding and keep plowing ahead.
• They fail to make inferences.

Improving vocabulary knowledge is relatively straightforward – use context clues, make educated guesses, and look up the words. But monitoring and making inferences are trickier because they require self-awareness and background knowledge. Willingham and Lovette give an example of a brief passage that omits important information: 

I can’t convince my boys that their beds aren’t trampolines. The building 

manager is pressuring us to move to the ground floor.

To understand these sentences, readers have to infer that jumping on beds is noisy, the downstairs neighbors have complained to the building manager, and if the beds were on the ground floor there wouldn’t be anyone downstairs to disturb. The writer assumed readers would have this background knowledge and omitted some connective tissue, but a novice reader would have difficulty putting it all together. 

Teaching reading comprehension is different from teaching a novice golfer how to swing the club. A golf coach works on skills like not gripping the club too tightly, looking toward the target, adopting the right stance, and practice, practice, practice with lots of feedback until the swing is automatic. But teaching reading comprehension strategies [RCS] “can’t tell a reader the specifics of how to achieve reading comprehension,” say Willingham and Lovette, “because comprehension depends on connecting the meaning of sentences, and doing that depends on sentence content. No RCS can offer general guidelines about how to connect sentences; you need to know that the first sentence is about bed trampolines and the second sentence is about apartment managers before you know how they relate.” 

So how do students get better at making sense of difficult texts? Willingham and Lovette believe that a few key strategies need to be explicitly taught, but continuing to spend a lot of time on them doesn’t produce further gains. “The strategies are helpful but they are quickly learned and don’t require a lot of practice,” they say. “Ten sessions yield the same benefit as fifty sessions.” There’s good news here: the time saved can be devoted to vocabulary instruction and building students’ background knowledge, which are much more important to improving reading comprehension.

The approach students need to learn is akin to the big-picture instructions Ikea might give for assembling a piece of furniture: Put stuff together. Every so often, stop, look at it, and evaluate how it’s going. It may also help to think back on other pieces of furniture you’ve built before. “The vague Ikea instructions aren’t bad advice,” say Willingham and Lovette. “You’re better off taking an occasional look at the big picture as opposed to keeping your head down and your little hex wrench turning. Likewise, RCS encourage you to pause as you’re reading, evaluate the big picture, and think about where the text is going. And if the answer is unclear, RCS give students something concrete to try and a way to organize their cognitive resources when they recognize that they do not understand.” 

Struggling readers need to understand an even more basic idea: Reading is more than decoding – it’s figuring out what the writer is trying to communicate to you. Students who are having difficulty reading often lose sight of this idea; they approach reading as if the goal is to make it through to the last word on the page. To help these students, teachers need to make this link, immerse students in vocabulary and background knowledge, and get them doing hundreds of hours reading. 

“Can Reading Comprehension Be Taught?” by Daniel Willingham and Gail Lovette in Teachers College Record (online), September 26, 2014, 

http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=17701 

From the Marshall Memo #557