Empathy and Language Learning

Empathy has many meanings. The one I prefer sources from Brene Brown, who in I Though It Was Me, explained, “understanding someone because you know the experience.”

In some cases, as an educator – and I will speak for myself – empathy related to “learning to read” comes about in two ways: 1) remembering an experience and allowing that experience to guide instruction with the child (and perhaps some self-disclosure) and 2) living a very similar experience simultaneously despite the different contexts.

The former is what many of us are most familiar with and likely how we approach students to build strong relationships with our students. The latter is a bit tougher. Since we are licensed educators with degrees it seems unlikely that we would live a similar experience to students as they work through foundational skills. Or is it?

To begin, a few examples would be reading research, medical texts, or lawyerese. Though we may be able to read every word on the page, that doesn’t mean we understand things! From time to time, I show and read aloud primary sources written in a different style of English to show students there are times when I need to clarify or use fix-up strategies.

Using the Simple View or Reading, it might stand to reason that I don’t have the language comprehension necessary to comprehend the text even though my word recognition is perfectly adequate.

In this same vein, some of the best experiences I’ve ever had working with students are from working with the French language.? I love to fancy myself a student of French (when I’m in Quebec or Neveau Brunswick), but in reality, I cannot speak a word of French nor comprehend when someone speaks to me in French. I have, however, retained enough knowledge of the language, by learning to read, that I thought I could communicate with my ESOL French speakers.

I thought I could read French. By this I mean, I could say basic salutary phrases and a few responses including my mainstay, “Je suis fatigue.”? My reading, however, was much better. As a result of French in high school and another four semesters to earn a B.A. in history, I, for whatever reason, learned more words and recognized more words from reading than I ever did listening (this would be analogous to much foundational reading instructions in the first 15 years of my teaching). So, reading French picture books came with relative ease for me. This allowed me to connect with students in learning how to clarify or use fix-up strategies when reading.

Needless to say, demonstrating students' word recognition vs. comprehension through a read-aloud became a running joke between the students and me because, in their opinion, I couldn’t speak French (nor read it).

What I would do to model foundational literacy instruction and empathize with my French-speaking students by trying to read to them in their primary language as they learned to read English, my primary (only) language, in an authentic context. I also did this because I feared patronizing them trying to pretend I didn’t know English, which could also be interpreted as mocking them. That’s not how relationships are fostered. Rather, I authentically portrayed my struggles with reading French despite possessing relatively good decoding skills. My students tended to laugh at (with) me when I read these books because, as they attested, I could indeed read the words, but that didn’t mean I had proper annunciations. They were working on their understanding of language comprehension, something I didn’t have. I was working with the word knowledge; they didn’t have in English.

If all else failed, whether coming across words I couldn’t read and/or didn’t know the meaning of, I’d look at the picture and figure it out, a common strategy used before the Science of Reading movement. For the most part, it works. At least in terms of concrete nouns and a few simple verbs.? But, when it came to syntactical changes, that is grammar I’d forgotten, things went downhill fast. My students often corrected me, which softened the corrective feedback I provided. We understood each other – though I never laughed at them like they did me. This empathy established a reciprocal relationship and mutuality.

Eventually, as the students soon discovered, I was unable to read more complex texts. We’re not talking Jacques Prevert poetry (which befuddles me), but basic middle-grade novel series found in Quebecois Walmart and Archambault’s. Again, I knew the words, but I reached the point where I couldn’t understand so many semantic and syntactical language structures. I was legitimately, trying to clarify almost every word’s meaning. Mind you, I was able to figure out the roots and bases of many French morphological words. Morphemes, mainly the suffixes, that always threw me off.? The suffixes changed word meanings and I didn’t know enough French to use context clues effectively to clarify. I may have been bumping into “spicy and juicy” vocabulary words, but I had no idea what to do with them!

This was no longer funny to my students. It bored them - the same boredom they feel when they cannot figure out any sort of meaning. Further, the reality is, for the sake of trying to read and see what I could read in French, I could have spent a half hour or more reading middle-grade novels just to try to learn and read new words. That doesn’t mean I would have been able to figure out a thing. Eventually, as I have experienced, I get bored, tired, and give up. This is exactly why many “struggling” or even on-grade-level readers do not read independently.? They can word call, decode, and access 97% or more of the printed word, sans morphological words. That doesn’t mean they are making meaning. What it means is that they are being compliant, though lost in the weeds of semantics and syntax that create a deeper understanding of the language and the ability to infer. Yet, I insist they clarify when they have almost no capacity of how the text works beyond word-level comprehension, perhaps the integration of meaning from their oral comprehension and maybe background knowledge. I have to remind myself of this recalling my own experiences, rather than forcing students into circumstances that will only make them hate reading.

This is the very experience so many of my struggling readers experienced, as I reflect while relearning the principles of the Science of Reading. It begs the importance of ensuring that students have a strong oral lexicon and that simply being able to read words is not enough.

Yes, I can navigate my way around Quebec without any issues.? I can construct meaning on placards or nominal reading like a racing program because of my background knowledge but it would take more sustained experiences in listening to French and more time reading French to become what might be considered fluent.? What this means for our students is not only to learn beside them but to immerse them in the components that make up the idea of being able to read.

The strain put on teachers to backfill foundational skills while needing to develop comprehension skills.? It was as if struggling readers were the new norm – the new reality or expectation in the classroom and the instructional practices employed as struggling students passed through the ranks were acceptable.