My colleague Daniel T. Willingham writes a regular column for the American Educator and I was reminded of one of those columns when someone asked me about teaching reading comprehension to students with Learning Disabilities. The article is entitled, “The Usefulness of Brief Instruction in Reading Comprehension Strategies” and it appeared in the winter 2006-2007) issue of
Question: In a recent column you said that background knowledge is essential for reading comprehension. What about reading comprehension strategies? Isn’t it important to teach children comprehension strategies to help them get everything out of what they read?
The effectiveness of teaching reading comprehension strategies has been the subject of over 500 studies in the last 25 years. The simple conclusion from this workis that strategy instruction improves comprehension. Much more difficult to answer are the interesting questions that follow: How much do strategies help? How do they work? Do all students benefit? How much time should be spent on them? The answers are not yet clear, but combining what cognitive scientists know about reading with patterns of data from experiments conducted in classrooms allows us to draw some tentative conclusions. It appears that reading strategies do not build reading skill, but rather are a bag of tricks that can indirectly improve comprehension. These tricks are easy to learn and require little practice, but students must be able to decode fluently before these strategies can be effective.
Beyond making the critical point that comprehending what one reads depends on being able to read it, Professor Willingham goes on to explain that there is considerable overlap with comprehending spoken language. However, the overlap is not perfect. Speakers adjust their content according to the listener, but print doesn’t adjust depending on the reader; and listeners can ask speakers to say something again in a different way, but readers only have what the author wrote.
But, back to the strategies. Professor Willingham shows how comprehension strategies produce benefits (albeit relatively small ones when one takes into account how researchers examine the benefits) and which general types of strategies have been consistently found to produce those benefits. However, these outcomes must be taken in the context of larger effects on comprehension: Students’ vocabulary and general background knowledge are major players in their understanding of what they read. To be sure, we need to teach students—especially those who have Learning Disabilities—comprehension strategies that help them make connections among sentences and remember what they have read, but we also have to help them develop stronger vocabularies and acquire a rich corpus of background knowledge.
This resolves to another argument for complete teaching. We simply can’t expect to find the proverbial magic bullet, the key skill, the one critical component that, when applied (however carefully) will turn a student with Learning Disabilities into one who’s routinely successful.
Link to a PDF of Professor Willingham’s column.
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