Comments on: Willingham: Reading Is Not a Skill

By: Jonathan Lind

Jonathan Lind — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:17:19 +0000

I have taught for 30 years in Virginia’s elementary schools, have been in classrooms throughout the country, and I can give this blunt assessment of the state of reading in the USA: There is little reading going on in the schools.

Oral language development throughout the grades lacks coherence and continuity in content, early systematic decoding instruction is chaotic where it exists, and deliberate reading practice (independent reading) is absent or deficient in nearly every school.

In Virginia and many other states, panic caused by NCLB legislation and preoccupation with state standards of learning (SOL’s) have pushed reading instruction from bad to worse. Stratagies to beat the tests in the intermediate grades are so dominating schools that literacy is given little attention and the focus has shifted to the upper elementary grades where students are tested more rigorously.

Teachers should be reading orally to students across domains throughout elementary school, students should be reading independently in school at least an hour a day, and reading instruction in kindergarten and first grade should systematically and quickly teach students decoding skills to get them reading independently.

Reading (through reading to students and independent reading) should be a main vehicle for expansion of students’ general background knowledge and domain specific knowledge. Most elementary schools don’t come close to doing this.

By: Tom Burkard

Tom Burkard — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 07:47:29 +0000

In the distant days when I was in primary school, no one had ever heard of teaching ‘reading comprehension skills’. Rather, we had short tests virtually every day, and these concentrated our minds rather wonderfully. They certainly taught us all of the ’skills’ which now take so much time in school.

As Dan has pointed out, the only useful function of teaching formal skills is to get kids to pay attention to text. I would propose that there is a far better way: give children reading material that is genuinely interesting. A few years back I read ‘Rabble in Arms’, Kenneth Roberts’s fascinating account of how Benedict Arnold thwarted the British drive to divide the Colonies. I couldn’t help but think how much kids could learn about the American Revolution if they were given books like this to read, instead of dry textbooks edited so as not to give offense to anyone.

Of course, what we are up against here is two of the holiest canons of progressive education: No Competition, and Political Correctness. The logic of textbook selection committees ensures that kids’ reading material is so anodyne that no one could possibly care what it ‘means’.

By: Gina

Gina — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:22:16 +0000

Well it sounds great not to have to teach the reading skills for comprehension to apply. However, I teach 5th grade. I have students that come to me with very little prior knowledge of anything. They have never been exposed to much, and they are very low in reading skills. How do you place that lack of prior knowledge in vocabulary in these type kids? I teach them to make any type of connection, but as was said earlier, if there is nothing to connect to what do you do to help them comprehend various reading information?

By: Reader Mom

Reader Mom — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:12:43 +0000

In my opinion, tt is important that students have enough “stuff” to connect. Teachers often talk about “making connections”, when discussin reading comprehension, but if your world is small and your experiences rather thin, it is difficult to relate to profound ideas as you move into more complex subject matter.
Therefore, sometimes what seems to be disparate content allows us to grasp the notion of a “subtext” within more advanced literature. Additionally, nonfiction reading presuposes a vocabulary or else the flow can be too irratic to understand the subject.

By: Dan Willingham

Dan Willingham — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:33:01 +0000

Hey Tom
You’re absolutely right. I’m assuming that these low level skills will be practiced enough that they are fluent for most readers by 4th or 5th grade. I think US performance on international tests (pretty good in the early grades for reading) indicate that most US kids are getting this. It’s not until 8th grade and h.s. that US kids really take a nosedive in reading performance. That’s when reading tests no longer tap decoding and decoding fluency (because most kids are competent by then) and instead tap comprehension.

Now as to writing a follow up that emphasizes the need to practice low-level skills. . . I try to write only one column each month that yield a cascade of angry emails
Dan

By: Over Achiever Mommy

Over Achiever Mommy — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:20:49 +0000

I agree that if a person is reading about something they already know, they will comprehend and remember more of the details they read. My daughter who is 7yrs old and in 3rd grade can read well only because we talk about what she is about to read, first. Then, she reads about it. If she is not understanding, she stops, we discuss it and then she continues to reads. It sure helps to know something about the topic, person or place you are reading about. It helps with information retention, not just short term comprehension.

By: Tom Carr

Tom Carr — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:14:47 +0000

Hey, Dan. What you say is true, but the devil is in what you leave out. Reading comprehension requires background knowledge that can be automatically retrieved by the cues from what you’re reading, background knowledge that you need to think of and hence retrieve intentionally and with effort, and a general attitude toward understanding what you’re reading and trying to relate it to what you already know. But reading comprehension ALSO requires a lot of “lower level” SKILLS that are practiced enough to be automatic enough to not interfere with those of the higher-level knowledge-based processes that you emphasize. If a reader spends all his or her mental energy and capacity trying to figure out words and/or syntax, there’s not going to be enough information passing forward to higher-level processes, or mental energy/capacity left over to make the connections and help build them into representations of the content of what is being read, to be able to understand and remember the material. There’s LOTS of evidence for the way I just described it — if you think I’ve got it wrong, I’d love to hear back why. But if you think I’ve got it right, I’d love to see you write a followup in your column…. Best regards, Tom Carr
Professor of Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience
Department of Psychology
Michigan State University
carrt@msu.edu

By: ColoradoCKTeacher

ColoradoCKTeacher — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:10:37 +0000

To answer Sal’s question…I taught 4th grade for 7 years (all in CK schools). The main thing I love about CK is the incredible content it teaches! When I was teaching my students read a lot of great fiction (classic stories like Gulliver’s Travels and Treasure Island) and a lot of non-fiction books as well that related to the content we were studying (The Middle Ages, China, The American Revolution). I read aloud to them and we also listened to Jim Weiss’s CDs.
All that said, however, yes! I absolutely let my students read silently every day. After lunch we (myself included) would read for 15 minutes and the students were allowed to read a book of their choosing. I left the choice up the them, as long as it was at their reading level. I did not allow comic books or magazines. As the teacher, though, I had a WELL stocked library of books – including lots of non-fiction content books that the students would choose from and I was happy to help guide and direct students to books that I felt they would enjoy.

By: Student of History

Student of History — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:50:34 +0000

When looking for great stories with rich vocabularies, don’t forget the 398.2 nonfiction area where the fairy tales and folk tales from all over the world reside.

Also Bill Peet may be the best children’s story book author ever!! Check him out.

By: Genevieve

Genevieve — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:24:11 +0000

We also do a lot of reading aloud at home. Besides picture and chapter books, we also read a lot of nonfiction. Our library has a great selection of non-fiction picture books. My daughter especially loves the biographies.
We have found nonfiction especially important because her school (1st grade) doesn’t spend a lot of time on science or social studies.