Without Comprehension, Is It Really Reading?

By: Betsy Hill and Roger Stark

Editor’s Note: This is part one of a two-part series.

We often hear from parents that their child struggles with reading comprehension. Their child can “read” a text, but then can’t remember what they read or answer questions or do anything with the information from the text. The school may say that their child can read but they lack comprehension. So, parents ask: Is reading without comprehension really reading?

How students make the leap from decoding to understanding is something that has challenged teachers since the days of Readin’ and Ritin’ and Rithmetic. That challenge and the fact that reading scores nationally have recently experienced the largest drop since 1990 are reasons for the current focus on the Science of Reading. The Science of Reading supports a view of reading as comprised of four skills:

Decoding (with an emphasis on phonemic awareness and phonics),

Fluency,

Vocabulary, and

Comprehension.

In other words, comprehension is a necessary component of reading. But when students can’t demonstrate comprehension, educators measure decoding and fluency and vocabulary to try to understand whether those processes are standing in the way.

The problem is that, even when students can decode and read with reasonable fluency and expression and know the vocabulary, the comprehension problem can persist. And even the first three skills can be taught but not reflected in a child’s performance in class or on tests. One parent wrote to us the other day, “My child can decode with the special ed tutor, but forgets to apply what he’s learned when he gets to class and on tests.” In other words, their child can apply rules consistently within a controlled environment but hasn’t generalized those skills. He can’t understand, so he can’t really read.

Reading Is Not Just Speech on Paper

Here we need to talk briefly about what reading is and what it isn’t. First, reading is not speech. Human beings have evolved for speech; our brains are wired to learn language. Children are born with the wiring that enables them to master speech without effort and without direct instruction. (We are setting aside issues like deafness and other neuro-anomalies, since we are focused on comparing speech and reading). Reading, on the other hand, is not “natural.” Our brains are not wired for us to learn reading when we are born. Reading doesn’t happen developmentally as speech does. Each individual has to develop the connections among parts of the brain that are not involved in reading for itself – there is no genetically coded wiring for reading. Children do not, with rare exceptions, learn to read without direct instruction.

But speech and language are clearly related to reading. We can write down what someone says and when we read, aloud or otherwise, we recognize the utterances as language and understand it as speech.

It sounds like it should be easy. We can speak. The symbols on a written page (at least for English and other phonological languages) represent sounds, and sounds make up words. Our brain understands words. It should be easy, right?

But here’s the rub. Our brains don’t process symbols on the page the way they process speech. And even if we did, written language, especially English, presents us with all kinds of difficulties. Read these words out loud… home, dome gnome, tome, some, come. All of those words end in “ome.” Did you pronounce them the same? Now, read these words … to, too, two, tutu. That is tutu, that is, too too good! In other words, written English is not reliably phonetic, so we also learn rules and exceptions.

And here’s another rub. Even when we can reliably “decode” words and pronounce them correctly, our ability to perform “decoding” can be fostered or impeded by skills we don’t even think of as reading skills. Cognitive skills such as sustained attention, visual discrimination, auditory discrimination and sequential processing, among others, affect decoding.

If a student can’t sustain their attention for the time it takes them to sound out a word, and wanders off partway through, and they have to back up and start the word over, decoding will be challenging.

If a student can’t visually discriminate between an r and an n or a b and p in thousandths of a second, decoding will be challenging.

If a student doesn’t actually hear the difference between b and p or r and l, understanding spoken language and decoding will both be problematic.

If a student can’t keep the letters or the sounds in the right order, then decoding will be challenging (Betsy’s sister as a little girl said lipskit instead of lipstick and psghetti instead of spaghetti).

On top of the complexities of trying to teach a very complicated mental process (decoding) to students, teachers are asked to teach the skill to brains who often don’t have the underlying skills to perform the process.

Cognitive Skills Underpin All “Reading Skills”

Now, what about fluency? We can’t instruct fluency as we do phonics. Fluency comes from practice. For competent readers, decoding eventually becomes automatic, or something that happens without conscious thought. Having a skill at an automatic level means that, once internalized through practice, the skill resides in implicit memory (also called “procedural memory”). Implicit or procedural memory allows the brain to carry out processes without conscious thought so that our conscious thought can be devoted to other matters (such as understanding what we are reading). The key to automaticity is repetition, or lots and lots of practice. The more we practice the same thing in the same way, the more automatic it becomes. Just like learning to ride a bike, or tying your shoes, or playing a piano piece, or throwing a football pass. But practice doesn’t always get everyone to the necessary level of fluency. We all know people who don’t ride a bike well or who swear by slip-on shoes, or who never got very good at piano, or who can’t consistently throw a football pass … or students who struggle to develop reading fluency.

There are some critical skills that will foster or impede the development of fluency of reading, even with extensive practice. Remember that these are just some of the cognitive skills involved in fluency.

Visual span. Visual span refers to the amount of information we can take in at a glance. It requires the integration of information from our center vision (the central part of the visual field where we read a word) and our peripheral vision (the part of the visual field at the periphery). The better our visual span, the more information we can take in at a glance. Whether we can see groups of words or process them only one at a time is affected (but not determine wholly) by visual span and other oculomotor skills.

Flexible attention. This cognitive process enables us to shift our focus smoothly from one word to the next and one line to the next.

Processing speed. Processing speed is not the same as intelligence and is not correlated with understanding. It is simply how long it takes our brains to perceive, receive, interpret and respond to a stimulus. We need to be able to process the information we are reading at an appropriate pace (processing speed) for what is considered fluency in reading.

When and where in our education system do we develop and ensure that students have the visual span, flexible attention and processing speed needed to develop fluency?

Now, what about vocabulary?

There is plenty of evidence for the importance of vocabulary and background knowledge for reading. Our brains work to fit whatever we encounter into prior knowledge. Think about this … you are about to take a high-stakes reading test. You get to choose a complex text to read. You can read a passage about how the rules of football have changed, about the use of cosmetics in different countries, or the roles of microglia in supporting neuronal function. What will you choose?

Here again, there is enormous complexity in the acquisition of vocabulary and how we use it in reading, although it can seem fairly straightforward. After all, don’t we either know a word or not? Short answer: no. Here is a scenario.

You are reading a text and there is an unfamiliar word in it as follows. “In response to an urgent call from the farmer about one of his sheep that was giving birth, the vet reviewed in his mind all of the ovine complications and treatments that he had learned in university.”

If you already knew the word “ovine,” you were fine. But even if you didn’t, there are some pretty clear indications in the text itself that help you “understand” that ovine means “related to sheep.” So you “know” that word in context, if not all by itself (like if you had to come up with it on Jeopardy… “what is ovine?). That doesn’t require long-term memory although it certainly requires verbal reasoning.

Whether that word or any other makes it into long-term memory is another proposition. And how it gets there may rely on a whole bunch of skills that are not always considered as vocabulary skills.

Now consider a typical vocabulary assignment. The teacher says, “Here are your 10 vocabulary words for the week. Your assignment is to write the word, write the definition of the word, and write the word in a sentence.”

Did that kind of assignment work for you? If so, we’ll bet you dollars to donuts that you have stronger verbal memory than visual memory (or you were an incredibly diligent student). Did you “cheat” and draw pictures to help you remember new vocab words? Well, that’s not cheating!! That’s making use of your cognitive strengths – in this case, your visual memory is likely stronger than your verbal memory – to make learning more efficient. If we really want students to learn vocabulary, the assignment we described will likely result in frustration for students with weaker verbal memory, frustrating them, and failing to help them actually learn the words.

Like decoding and fluency, vocabulary requires cognitive skills that are not instructed and which are weaker in some students than others.

Now, for Comprehension

This is obviously an enormous topic and one that we don’t have room to treat fully in this article. But this is an opportunity to make a few points that we hope will make the underlying role of cognitive skills clearer. And for this purpose, we can use the example of a spoken conversation rather than written communication (reading). We can do this because we are going to assume that decoding and fluency and vocabulary have already been developed. So, we’re dealing with a situation that is more like regular speech.

First, we need to distinguish between understanding and memory. They are not unrelated, but they have very different trajectories in our brains. We can understand and not remember. We can also (with significant effort) remember but not understand.

Let’s say your friend tells you a story about a cousin of theirs who rented a Vrbo in Cabo San Lucas (which you have no interest in visiting) and had a great time with their friends (whom you don’t know). They played golf (which you don’t), jet skied (which you’ve never done) and loved the ceviche at the hotel, but not at another restaurant. You part ways and then you don’t see your friend for two years…

Most likely, you will understand this story and will be able to conduct a whole conversation about it with your friend. Will you remember it when you see him two years later? That is a completely different matter.

Understanding in the moment involves cognitive skills such as verbal reasoning and working memory (holding information in your mind while you understand it).

Remembering the story days, weeks or years later involves long-term memory skills, emotions, whether you’ve retold the story to others, tried ceviche yourself, and many other factors.

Without even getting into the difficult and contentious question about how retention and comprehension are measured in an academic setting, it should already be clear that comprehension is not unique to a written text. But let’s look at comprehension for reading, specifically.

Cognitive Skills for Reading Comprehension

Reading puts demands on many cognitive skills and there are some that are especially important for comprehension. These include Working Memory, Visualization, Verbal Reasoning, Abstract Reasoning and Flexible Thinking.

Working Memory

Think about what you are doing when you read. You decode words. You hold words in mind while you put them together to create meaning. You retrieve information from long-term memory to compare the new information to. This conscious processing of information to create meaning (understanding or comprehension) is called working memory. Working memory capacity is limited, and for some students it is more limited than for others. We can only hold so much information in mind at a time. So, when children struggle with reading comprehension (but not with other aspects of reading), working memory may be an important reason.

Visualization

Visualization is another vital reading comprehension skill. Visualization is the ability to see something that isn’t physically present. Reading is like watching a movie but without the visual content. Our minds supply that content based on our experiences and imagination. That’s why we can be so disappointed when we see a movie that is based on a book; it doesn’t match up with the way we imagined it. We don’t need actual visual input to “see” what we read but we may often need to visualize to comprehend.

Difficulty visualizing or creating that mental image of what we read can be another barrier to comprehension.

Verbal Reasoning

Verbal reasoning refers to the process of thinking with language-based information. It starts with basic vocabulary and life experiences. If you have never seen or heard of a cherry tree, you may not be able to create a visual image. If you don’t know what a policeman is, you may be missing important information to fully understand the story.

Verbal reasoning extends beyond literal language to how we interpret figurative language or draw inferences from what we read. When someone says, “that was a piece of cake,” verbal reasoning prevents us from looking around for a physical piece of cake. We know that the expression signifies that something was very easy. We also know that someone who gives us “a piece of their mind,” isn’t undergoing surgery in order to hand over a chunk of grey matter. And we know that “peace of mind” and “piece of mind” are two very different concepts, although they sound exactly the same.

Difficulty with verbal reasoning can significantly hamper reading comprehension, especially in drawing inferences and using figurative language.

Abstract Reasoning

Abstract reasoning involves seeing patterns, thinking conceptually and understanding relationships such as cause and effect or parts and wholes. Let’s read the following sentence.

As soon as the mailman left, Jenny flipped through the pile of envelopes, then threw them on the table and ran up to her room, sobbing as she ran.

What inference do you draw from that sentence? Do you think any of the envelopes was addressed to Jenny? Do you think Jenny was expecting something in the mail and it didn’t come? Those would be reasonable inferences to draw. In this case, it’s not about understanding the figurative meaning of the words, but about interpreting behavior. Abstract reasoning helps us fill in gaps – coming up with a cause that would explain the relationship between the mail and Jenny’s tears. Weaker abstract reasoning may leave the reader puzzled by Jenny’s behavior even if they precisely understand every word in the sentence.

Flexible Thinking

Flexible thinking is the cognitive skill that enables us to shift gears when something changes in the world around us. It is what enables us to see things from multiple perspectives or points of view.

What career or job would you have if you couldn’t fail?

Betsy once encountered that question once and came up with an answer. She interpreted the question as asking what I would become if failure was to be avoided at any cost. In other words, I thought I was being asked what job or career I would choose as the safest, to avoid risk, to be certain of success.

But that’s not what the questioner meant. They meant for me to tell them what I would do if I was assured of success, no matter what, that is, if I literally couldn’t fail. The answer to that question was very different. Being able to shift one’s mindset, regroup and choose a different pathway when our first strategy doesn’t work, and seeing things from different perspectives will also affect reading comprehension.

Building minds that are ready for reading skills, including comprehension

Comprehension is the ultimate purpose of reading. While educators measure decoding and fluency separately, unless students can understand what they read, there is no point to it. And there can be a lot of angst when 3rd grade “learning to read” turns into 4th grade “reading to learn” if comprehension issues are not addressed.

In this article, we’ve connected basic cognitive processes (learning skills) to reading, to show that learning to read needs more than instruction according to the science of reading. So, what can we do if a child has weaknesses in any of these areas? The good news is that today we know that the cognitive skills we have discussed in this article can be strengthened with the right kind of comprehensive integrated cognitive training.

And although cognitive training is not a substitute for reading instruction, we now know that the process of acquiring reading skills can be optimized by a combination of the science of reading, the cognitive skills-driven science of learning, and our modern take on the science of teaching. Like a tripod that can find level ground by adjusting the legs to find equilibrium, the sciences of reading, learning and teaching bring a 360-degree view of the learner, offering clarity and focus to affect a greater outcome.

Reading almost always requires explicit instruction. But reading instruction for children whose cognitive skills are not well developed often results in frustration, loss of self-esteem, and an inability to comprehend what they read. They know, just as well as their teachers and parents that, if they can’t comprehend what they read, then they’re not really reading.

Editor’s Note: In part two, we will explore the impact of cognitive skills development in the reading process.