Science of Reading: The Podcast

S9 E4: Comprehension is not a skill, with Hugh Catts, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education • Season 9 • Episode 4

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In this episode Susan Lambert is joined by Hugh Catts, Ph.D., professor at Florida State University, to break down what comprehension is and bust some myths around what it isn’t. With a family history of dyslexia, he has a personal connection to the topic that led him into research in language sciences and language disorders. He discusses how his findings moved him away from viewing comprehension as simply a “component of reading” but rather something entirely separate—a condition created over time, defined by purpose, and influenced by prior knowledge. Together, Susan and Hugh address many comprehension-related contexts, such as the simple view of reading, the five pillars of reading, and comprehension’s relationship to knowledge building. Hugh also gives listeners practical advice for helping students suss out their comprehension before reading, and he clarifies why understanding the standard of coherence is important.

Show notes:

Quotes:
“If I was going to define comprehension, it's not a single thing. I mean, that's the problem. We want it to be a single thing, but it depends upon what you're reading and why you're reading it.” –Hugh Catts, Ph.D.

“What comprehension is is the interaction of what you bring into that reading situation and what you already know about it and your motivation and purpose to comprehend it.” –Hugh Catts, Ph.D.

“There's just not enough mental reserve to be able to build that meaning that quickly. So it helps tremendously that you have some knowledge about it beforehand. That knowledge gives you a place to put information. So when you read about something, it gives you storage for the information. It's kind of like a cubby hole that you put the mail in, in an office.” ––Hugh Catts, Ph.D.

Episode timestamps*
02:00 Introduction: Who is Hugh Catts?
03:00 Personal Connection to Dyslexia
07:00 Rethinking comprehension as a component of reading
11:00 Vocabulary and comprehension
15:00 Comprehension as a condition you create
16:00 Language comprehension and the simple view of reading
19:00 Differences in types of comprehension
26:00 What comprehension is and isn’t
32:00 Thinking deeply
39:00 Background knowledge and comprehension
42:00 Automatic inferencing
50:00 Final thoughts
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute


Hugh Catts:

So if I was going to define comprehension ... it's not a single thing. I mean, that's the problem. We want it to be a single thing, but it depends upon what you're reading and why you're reading it.

Susan Lambert:

This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast, from Amplify, where the Science of Reading lives. We are now on Episode 4 in our season-long Reading Reboot, Reexamining and Building on Foundational literacy concepts. We've already received some fantastic questions from listeners like you, and we're excited to explore them over the course of this season. I was just reading a great question about what's most important for administrators to know and look for when it comes to reading instruction. I can't wait to take that on in an upcoming episode, but I think today's episode will also help answer that. Remember to check out the show notes for a link to submit your own questions. Today, I'm thrilled to revisit the Simple View of Reading with renowned literacy expert Hugh Catts, professor of the School of Communication Science and Disorders at Florida State University. Dr. Catts will explain why he wants us to rethink our understanding of comprehension, and together we'll explore what this might mean for instruction and assessment. Without further ado, here's Dr. Hugh Catts. Dr. Hugh Catts, thank you so much for joining us on today's episode!

Hugh Catts:

Thanks! Great to be here .

Susan Lambert:

So, we always love to ask our guests to give our listeners just a little bit about your journey and maybe how you got into the world of literacy.

Hugh Catts:

Yeah, sure. I was originally trained in speech and language sciences. And with my first job, I taught courses like acoustics and phonetics. But I did teach a language disorders class. And in reading that — the readings for that — I ran across a paper on the phonological basis of dyslexia. So you have to recognize, this is in the early '80s, and it really hit home, because I have a family history of dyslexia. I had a brother who had dyslexia, and I had a lot of trouble learning to read in the first couple of grades. And the one thing that we shared were the phonological difficulties, right ? So all the things that they were talking about in those papers were problems that I'd experienced all my life, but just didn't know were relevant to reading and dyslexia. So I completely changed my program of study. And although I remained in a communication disorders program, I read everything I could about dyslexia, and actually ended up changing universities so I could teach courses related to dyslexia and reading and so forth. And that kind of led to, I don't know, 30-some-odd years of studying early identification of dyslexia, treatment related to dyslexia, its relationship to language disorders, I've always been interested in and so forth. So it was a roundabout way, but fortunately, I ran into it early in my career, rather than...

Susan Lambert:

Rather than later!

Hugh Catts:

Rather than later. I had plenty of time to think about it over the years.

Susan Lambert:

That must have been quite an "aha" moment both for you, personally and professionally. Wow.

Hugh Catts:

Yeah, yeah .

Susan Lambert:

That's really cool.

Hugh Catts:

It really was. I mean, it's one of these things: "Whoa, that's the problems that I have!"

Susan Lambert:

<laugh>

Hugh Catts:

And my brother and I — he's a little bit younger than I — we always talk about the difficulties we have, and laugh about it and so forth.

Susan Lambert:

That's good . That's good that you could also introduce him to what you both were experiencing, as both a scholar and a researcher. That's very interesting. And glad that you can laugh about it, because sometimes it could be frustrating, right?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah . It was at the time.

Susan Lambert:

Oh, I bet. I bet. So, we're gonna actually talk about comprehension. How did you make it from this world of phonics and phenology, speech language pathology, into this world of comprehension?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah. Well, initially, of course, we were interested in word reading, because that's a primary problem of kids with dyslexia. It's problems I have. It's a problem most directly related to phonological difficulties. But in following kids over a period of time, they got older, we had a wonderful study d one out of Iowa where w e identified kids with la nguaging problems at kindergarten and fo llowed t hem all the way through t he ir twenties. And as part of that, I was interested in the word-reading aspects of those kids, but we ended up giving comprehension measures. And so that got me interested in what's involved in comprehension. And I had a bit of a background, being in speech and language, to understand ab o ut comprehension. But I d id a number of studies there and spent probably the la st 10 years involved in some studies related to comprehension, but a good deal of reading and thinking about comprehension, and what problems might be there, what instruction we would do, and so forth.

Susan Lambert:

So, given all that thinking that you've done about this, what are you seeing that has been new to you? Or maybe some major problems in terms of our approach to comprehension?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah. I mean, when I first started, I thought about comprehension just like everybody else does. And that is that it was an aspect of reading that you could measure with a standardized test and get some estimate of ability. And then you could instruct or intervene and find some change in that ability. You know, over a shorter period of time you could see change in that ability. But, you know, over the last 10 or more years, I've kind of recognized that that's not really the case. That it's not something that you can measure with a standardized test in the same way that we measure other aspects of reading. And it's not something that's easily changed through instruction or intervention. It's, we think about change over a longer period of time, a change in comprehension occurs over the lifetime, as opposed to these other aspects of, of reading. And I think a major insight for me was that we've been thinking about comprehension as a component of reading. And that's what most people do. And we've got the five, the big five, or the five pillars of reading. But comprehension's really not a component of reading. It doesn't really share anything. And when I say comprehension, I wanna put vocabulary in there. They got separated in the NRP report, because there was research separately on comprehension and vocabulary, but I kind of think about those as the same thing. And those two are not like the other three aspects of the big five, in the sense that they're not skills that you could train and then apply across the board. You know, I always use the example of swimming: If you learn how to swim, you can swim in a lake, a pool, an ocean, whatever. But that's not the case for comprehension. You can't learn to comprehend and then take that out into different situations for different purposes. You can learn some things that will help you, but in general, it's the topic and the purpose that are gonna impact how well you understand something. And recognizing that, it's a big shift in the way that we think about comprehension. It's more like listening comprehension or movie comprehension. When you watch a movie, you're actually engaged in building an understanding of what's going on in that movie. And that's not all that different than when you read a book.

Susan Lambert:

Right.

Hugh Catts:

So if you've got a narrative movie and a narrative book, they're similar in many ways. Or a documentary and an expository book — very similar in the types of cognitive activities that you engage in. Some important differences, but they are similar for the most part.

Susan Lambert:

You know, that, that makes me think of one of my big "aha"s with comprehension. It was, you know, comprehension isn't. "you either comprehend it or you don't comprehend it." It's not black and white, either. But it's sort of how well do you comprehend it or how differently do you comprehend it? So going back to your movie idea, if you and I go watch the same movie, we're going to come out of that movie and talk about maybe some really different things or get some really different models of what was happening in that movie from each other. Same when you're reading a book, right? Like in a book club, many people read the same book, but they come together and they're like, "That's not what I got from that." Is that a little bit what you're talking about?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah, kind of . I mean, I didn't bring in the individual differences in that way. But comprehension's a combination of what the reader brings into the situation of reading and the book and purpose that they're reading, the text and the purpose of it. Same way with what you walk into the movie theater with interacts with the storyline and the visual images, whatever's in the m ovie. You know, the other comparison that works even better is listening comprehension. So, reading comprehension a nd listening comprehension are very similar in that t he listener brings in certain knowledge about the topic and certain interests in the topic. And that impacts how well they understand, or what, in your words, what type of understanding they have about the particular text.

Susan Lambert:

So we're gonna jump into this understanding about language comprehension in just a minute, because it's so related to the Simple View of Reading, which we talk about all the time. But before we go there, can I ask you this question? You made a point that you feel like vocabulary and comprehension are more like each other. Do you mean they're more like each other than the other elements of the big five? Phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency?

Hugh Catts:

Yes. You know, initially when the NRP panel got together, they were gonna review the literature, talking about advances in instruction and reading. So they were coming at , "What does the research tell us about that?" Well, they divided all that literature up into alphabetics, fluency, and comprehension. So, vocabulary was part of comprehension in their mind. It just so happens that the research that had been done had either isolated comprehension by teaching comprehension explicitly, or the research had worked on text comprehension primarily by teaching strategies. So that you could make conclusions about one independent of the other. They had to do look at the studies that addressed one and not necessarily the other. So it's unfortunate that vocabulary gets divided out from comprehension. 'Cause it's central to comprehension. It's part of what you need to have, to be able to understand a text. But I always have to say it's part of comprehension. 'Cause the big five, of course, has it listed as another area of reading.

Susan Lambert:

Right. Yeah. I think there's an article that you wrote about that, that I often use in presentations about the unintended consequences of the five-pillar images that we always see in presentations and professional development: that phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension are all sort of the same size pillars. Or they're all pillars underneath this big , big umbrella.

Hugh Catts:

Yeah. And even in the big five, you can sometimes see where comprehension's a little box at the top of the infographic, you know? But it does give the impression that they're independent and you could actually work on each of those five. And there is now legislation in 34 different states that have the pillars of reading instruction, it's mentioned explicitly in there. And that's another place we can get the impression that teachers ought to work on, on phonemic, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. And again, the reason they appear as independent categories is 'cause the researchers that did the review wanted to look at the independent contributions of it. They never suggested that those things should be done independently of each other. We would work on phonological awareness in this context of learning phonics, and both of those in the context of becoming more fluent. And we work on vocabulary and comprehension at the same time. I think we could even tie vocabulary and comprehension more tightly together. You would never work on vocabulary without working on its meaning within a context that you're trying to understand.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And another "aha" I had: We recently did an episode with Dr. Sharon Vaughn, and she says reading comprehension can't be taught; it's an outcome. And that was something that was an "aha" for me too, because how many teachers in the classroom right now are their lesson plans all about teaching comprehension?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah.

Susan Lambert:

And it's a misunderstanding.

Hugh Catts:

And it's a goal! Right? It's a goal. A child will comprehend better. Two things wrong with that. You're not gonna be able to measure that difference in traditional measures. And the other is that it takes ... I think Robert Pondiscio said that comprehension is not a skill; it's a condition you create.

Susan Lambert:

That's a good one. I always like that.

Hugh Catts:

Right. It's a condition you create by providing the background knowledge, the language skills, and the strategies come into that as well. But that happens over time. And over time, you create mental models and language abilities and thinking routines that allow you to do it better than you did several years earlier.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah. That's so great. So let's talk a little bit about language comprehension, because for all of our listeners, they're probably well aware of the framework of the Simple View of Reading that reading proficiency is a product of word recognition, language comprehension. I personally find that many people, when you ask them what language comprehension is, they don't even know where to start. So, when you think about language comprehension, what is this idea of language comprehension, in this world of reading proficiency?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah. Let's talk about it within the framework of the Simple View, like you just introduced . And most people don't understand where the Simple View came from. It was Philip Gough and Bill Tunmer who came up with that in 1986. The reason they came up with it, where they were both interested in word reading and the fact that word reading was not getting enough attention in reading instruction. Some deja vu, right? <laugh>

Susan Lambert:

Yeah <laugh>.

Hugh Catts:

And so what they wanted to do was to illustrate how important those skills are that allow you to decode new words and read words fluently. And so, in their model, what they did was divide that portion of reading out, and they called it "decoding" or "word reading." And that was that portion of reading. And they talked about what was involved in that, and so forth. Everything else got put under the rubric of language comprehension. So that is everything involved in comprehension after you take out word reading. And I'll talk about what that might be and so forth. But it's not just language in that sense. It's everything that a reader does beyond recognizing the words. So it's gonna be a very complex phenomenon. And in a paper I talked about a number of years ago, on the Simple View, was that was another case of where we can get a false impression. We can assume when we see those two boxes, that language comprehension is similar to decoding in terms of its complexity and malleability. We know that it's not! But when you see that presented that way, it makes us think that those two things are things that you could address in intervention or instruction and actually make change fairly quickly.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah. And they equally contribute to reading comprehension over time, right?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah. And so, one way of dealing with that was a way that my colleague Alan Kamhai and I kind of entertained back in 2007–8, something like that. We said, "All right, we can solve this problem if we call 'decoding' 'reading'." And that's all reading is, is that. Everything else is comprehension. And by doing that, we can then think about other situations in which you comprehend, like listening, watching a movie, so forth. And talk about more broadly what's all involved in that? And Alan talked about it as the narrow view of reading. Now, at the time we introduced it, we did not expect everybody in the field of literacy to now redefine reading as only word reading! <Laugh> It was more of ... I call it a thought exercise that we wanted to have people think about. But it actually is coming now to where, with the types of assessments we're doing a nd the types of instruction we're doing, it's a more realistic way to think about what's involved in reading. 'Cause today, we have a much broader view or we're beginning to have a much broader view of what's involved in comprehension.

Susan Lambert:

Can you talk a little bit about that? What all is involved in comprehension?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah. Well, let's talk about the language component. Because that's the modifier of comprehension. And that's what, that's what they chose to use. I mean, I know Bill Tunmer pretty well, and I don't know if I ever asked him why he called it "language comprehension." I think at one time it was "linguistic comprehension." And of course everybody threw "listening comprehension" in there. And they've used those terms interchangeably. They can mean different things. But if we talk about the language part of it, language refers to a system of symbols that we use to communicate. And spoken language, it's t he sounds that we put together to form words. And the words that we order in particular way according to syntax t o make meaningful sentences. And then there's language rules: how you put those sentences together to write a text, and so forth. In written language, of course: You got the letters. The letters go t ogether t hrough words. And then the words similar way go together to form sentences and so forth. And t he sign language, that also has a vocabulary and a syntax to it. But if we just think about the listening and r eading, the language skills are gonna b e important. Right? So kids have begun developing that from birth on. They're acquiring their language skills. And that's why I said that reading intervention or reading instruction starts at birth. It doesn't start at first or second grade. Because those preschool years are really critical in language development. That's where kids are learning all the vocabulary. They're learning about the knowledge of the world and everything else. And so having rich input and rich dialogue with parents and friends is an important step in instructing reading comprehension. Y ou m ight think that's w here t he c ondition o f r eading comprehension s tarts. I k now S usan Neuman's always b een b ig o n t his. And it d oesn't g et a s m uch a ttention as it needs to in our concerns about why kids are doing so poor in reading comprehension. Well, it goes back a lot earlier than phonics a nd reading i nstruction.

Susan Lambert:

Hm.

Hugh Catts:

So there's that part. But then when you get near school, and you start engaging in books, you're learning a slightly different language than what parents or siblings or friends might interact with in the earlier grades . We use a slightly different language to write about. And the reason we do is we have to be much more specific, because in spoken language, the speaker can generally see the audience and can change their vocabulary or the way that they're saying it to help the listener. In reading comprehension, that's not available. So as writers, we tend to be much more specific. We use vocabulary that is specific to the particular meaning we have in mind. When there's a number of different synonyms that we could possibly use, we choose the one that's closer to the meaning that we have in mind. And we pack our sentences with grammar that helps explain the specific person we're talking about, the conditions under which that person did whatever they did, and those add to clauses being added to sentences. And so kids have to start to get experience with the language, or what's called academic language. And that comes from just reading more. And when you get to school, it also comes from writing more. Writing really helps you with the syntax, academic syntax. And then the text is different than a spoken dialogue. Even a lecture is gonna be somewhat different than a chapter on a particular topic. But they do share things. So, story grammar that occurs in a book is the same basic story grammar that I would use if I was telling you a story orally. Right? That's language as well. That's language beyond the sentence, if you will. And so you need to have that knowledge to be able to understand text. Or at least, you have to have a certain level of that to get into whatever it is you're reading. And what we we see is that some kids have difficulty learning language. They're slow to learn vocabulary. The syntax trips 'em up. And that's often the reason that they have comprehension problems. Those kids are referred to as having a developmental language impairment or DLD, developmental language disorders. And people are becoming just as interested in identifying those kids early on as they are identifying kids with dyslexia. Because the impact of having DLD is worse than having dyslexia, because DLD is highly associated with dyslexia, but it's also associated with having difficulties understanding what you're reading.

Susan Lambert:

Got it.

Hugh Catts:

So there's good reason to pay more attention to it.

Susan Lambert:

So I'm gonna backtrack a little bit and and summarize what I think I heard you said. First of all, huge impact for kids just coming to school. Their language experiences before they come to school have a significant impact on what happens the day that they walk in. So our kindergarten teachers know this well, right? That kids come with a range of experiences with language, and it's quite broad sometimes, even with monolingual learners, right? So we have a really big impact of what happens before kids come to school. I think that's what I heard you say? And I think kindergarten teachers can really relate to that. I never taught kindergarten, thank goodness, but I can relate to that one. The other thing that I think I heard you say is ... there's a difference in the modes of language or the registers, maybe we wanna call it, of what you experience outside of schooling. And what then you have to learn and experience when you come to school, in the process of schooling. So, academic language is different than the kind of language that kids use outside the schooling environment. Did I hear those two things correctly?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah. Yes. Very true. Yep .

Susan Lambert:

So language is a really important thing that fits someplace into comprehension -- both listening comprehension and reading comprehension. Is it a good time to make that segue into talking about what comprehension is?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah. We can move into there. So, if I was going to define comprehension, it's not a single thing. I mean, that's the problem. We want it to be a single thing. But it depends upon what you're reading and why you're reading it. Some people say that the purpose of reading is comprehension. It's not the purpose of reading. The purpose of reading is whatever you're comprehending for.

Susan Lambert:

Ah.

Hugh Catts:

So sometimes, all you want to do is find a fact within the text that you're reading. Right? You just want one little bit of info. Another time, all you want's the gist. You only kind of wanna know what's happening. So, when I read newspaper feeds, the e-copies that I get in the morning, most of the stories, I just want kind of a sense of it, right ?

Susan Lambert:

Yep .

Hugh Catts:

So I'm reading it at a level of the gist of it. And in other cases, it's really important for you. Right ? So, I'll give you an example of when that might be. So, when you look on the web for a disease that you may have found out you just had or one of your friends have, the level of comprehension there is gonna be much deeper, right? You're gonna spend much more time trying to get at the meaning of it, if you will, comprehend it. What comprehension is is the interaction of what you bring into that reading situation and what you already know about it, and your motivation and purpose to comprehend it.

Susan Lambert:

<laugh> . That's brilliant. That's brilliant. I love it.

Hugh Catts:

One of my colleagues calls it a " standard of coherence."What's your standard of coherence? That is, how much sense do you wanna make of this? <Susan laughs> And it's not the same for everything you read. I mean, most of life, it's pretty superficial, 'cause we read so much on the internet now. And much of that's read to get the gist out, right ? But in school, we're trying to build an understanding so that we learn something that we can later be able to apply. So we have to read it at a much deeper level. So, the understanding, sometimes called a mental model, the mental model that you build is gonna be richer. Because you wanna remember that later on.

Susan Lambert:

That's similar to listening comprehension though, as well, right?

Hugh Catts:

Yes. Very similar.

Susan Lambert:

That's great. I have a personal example — I just had a big "aha" here. So, when I took my language coursework in college, I learned about aphasia. I learned to memorize the definition of aphasia, and I kind of knew what it was. My dad recently had a major stroke and he now has expressive or Broca's aphasia. I'll tell you what, I know a lot more about aphasia now than I did from that college course where I just sort of memorized the definition.

Hugh Catts:

Yeah . Right . That's why I use the example, because most people can relate to that situation, to where there is something you really wanna understand, so you're motivated and you also have this higher standard that you're working for. Right? You're trying to build a much more complete understanding of it.

Susan Lambert:

So, in that same vein, what would you recommend then to classroom teachers? I mean, is it okay to have kids read something and it's not necessarily for deep, deep comprehension? Is that something we should be helping them understand? Reading for different purposes means reading for different ... I hate to say "levels of comprehension," 'cause that's not quite right, but ... you know what I mean?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah. I don't know; I haven't thought too much about that. But there are situations where, if you talked about p urposes of reading vary depending upon what the reading is for in class. So, for example, if you go to middle school and you talk about reading to write a paper, that's g onna require a different type of thinking than it would to read a chapter b ecause you're gonna have a test on it the next day. And that's something we should point out to students. That what it is that they should be doing in those situations to achieve that purpose. Right? So i f you're writing a paper, you're gonna have multiple sources. What are you gonna do first? You're gonna look to see if that source you just found, you're gonna have some idea of what your purpose is in the paper you're writing, what its overall mission is and so forth. Then, you'll go look at these papers and see if these papers fit into that mission ... or whether that paper will change the way you think about that mission. You might alter your idea of what you're writing. Those types of reading does not necessarily require building an extensive mental model at that moment in time. You'll come back and do that at a later point, when you've got your story down, and then you can really get down i n the nitty-gritties about the different sources that, that you're using. That might be the way that I would approach it. Teachers can think about the way that they would explain it to a middle-school student that's beginning to write, where they h ave multiple sources. But in the other case, if it is so mething you have to study for the next day, then you can talk about what are they gonna have to think about when reading that chapter that's gonna make them best prepared to answer the typical types of questions that are on exams related to that.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah. It makes me think about, as a teacher ... I taught mostly third grade, but I remember using a strategy and now I gotta go back and I'm questioning myself whether it was right or not! But I guess it doesn't matter anymore. Those kids are grown and gone. Right? <Laugh> I've already ruined them. No, just kidding. Anyway, we used to use a strategy to read this page, "read to find out." So essentially, look for a nugget in this page or pages, to find out this one thing, right?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah.

Susan Lambert:

So that's a type of purpose for reading, right?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah, you know, "look for the main idea" gets such bad press sometimes, but sometimes that's what one needs to do to begin with, is try to figure out what the passage is about. But it's not near enough. Then the next question was, "What specifically is it about?" So let's say it's about dolphins, right? And you ask the child, and "Well, it's about dolphins," is what the kid says. Right? But what you wanna know: What specifically is it about dolphins? Is it about their communication? Is it about their habitat? About what they eat? Their lifecycle? Those are the types of things that you would ask kids to think about, so that the next time they come to a passage about bears, they will also think about, "What specifically is it about?" And that's a nice thing about doing this within science, or whatever, whatever observations you make about the habitat of dolphins is gonna be directly relevant to habitat of a bear, even though one lives in water and the other doesn't. Right? They gotta eat! They gotta live somewhere! I don't know the habitat of dolphins very much <laugh>. But the vocabulary you use is quite similar from one context to the other. It's those types of strategies, if you will, that you would would want to think about. You know, you mentioned the strategies, and let me talk a little bit about strategies here. Because they've got a lot of attention ... and we didn't really talk about knowledge, if you wanna come back and ask some questions about it ... but, you know, the best predictor of whether you're gonna understand something or not is whether you already know something about it. And we sometimes forget that, in our instruction. And maybe we'll come back and talk about that in a minute.

Susan Lambert:

We should. Yep . Yep .

Hugh Catts:

But it's not just knowledge. You actually have to think about that knowledge. And that's goes back to the thing about thinking about it deeply when you need to, or think about a particular way depending on your purpose. But thinking is not a really easy thing to do. I mean, we're not biologically predisposed to think deeply. <laugh>

Susan Lambert:

Oh , thanks for saying that. I don't feel so bad now. <Laugh>

Hugh Catts:

You're not! Because thinking deeply allows you only to think deeply. You can't do much else when you're thinking deeply. Like, you might think, reading a book, trying to figure out the storyline in it, why that person did that, what's gonna happen? You lose yourself in the world. And that type of thinking is not good when you're driving your car around or doing other types of things — in earlier times, hunting for food, or whatever. So we're predisposed to think at a much more shallow level. So we have to turn on that level of thinking. And I always ask , "Well, how do we get kids to do that?" We can't tell 'em , "Think more deeply." < Laugh > Right? You're a third-grade teacher. Can you imagine telling your students, "All right, now what I want you to do is think more deeply about what you just read"? Right? <Laugh>

Susan Lambert:

< Laugh> Yeah.

Hugh Catts:

So how do we do it? Well , we give them ways to think more deeply about it. So we ask them , "What's the main idea? Can you paraphrase what that chapter said? Can you think back to what you read earlier, and think what that particular sentence means in terms of that? Make an inference based upon something earlier?" Can you just simply monitor: "Please think about whether you're understanding it as you go through"? All those strategies are good things for emerging readers to think about. But they're not what good readers consciously think about while they're reading. Theirs tend to be more specific to the purpose and the topic they're reading. They tailor it much, much closer to what they're trying to achieve there. I mean, some of it's unconscious, simply 'cause we've read so much. So we've got our strategies we use to help us think . But some of it is pretty conscious. You're constantly thinking, when you're reading something that's really tough, "Do I really understand this?" Or, "How is this fitting into the mental model that I have about this particular topic?" Right? When I'm writing a paper, I'm thinking, when I read this article, "Where does this fit into what I'm saying? Does it go along with it? Does it challenge it?" And so forth. And that type of thinking is dependent upon what it is and what your task is. So, as kids get more sophisticated, instruction and strategies need to be more specific to the topic and the purpose of it. Depending on whether they're studying for a test, trying to learn about this particular subject matter is gonna require s omething different than if you're trying to understand an argument. I f you're trying to understand a n argument, you have to think about, "Well, what's the premise? What's the evidence to support that? W hat's their bias? What's my bias?" That type of thing.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah. So, strategies are important, in service of learning the content or the purpose for the reading, right?

Hugh Catts:

Or ... enjoying, too! We have to put in there, you know!

Susan Lambert:

Oh, yeah.

Hugh Catts:

'Cause the strategy at night, when I'm trying to read a really tough book, and trying to figure out what's going on there and so forth. ...

Susan Lambert:

That makes sense. Okay. So let's come back to knowledge, because I've always been a believer in the importance of knowledge development. My first teaching job was in a school that used the core knowledge sequence. So I saw the power of developing kids' background knowledge, both in terms of motivation, but then what they bring to that for both reading comprehension, and I would say writing composition. So from your point of view, why is knowledge so important to this process of listening and reading comprehension?

Hugh Catts:

And movie comprehension too, right? I mean, because it's central to the building of the understanding. It's very difficult to build an understanding if you don't have any background knowledge. 'Cause to build a meaningful memory of something that you can hold on and use, you have to think about it, right ? One of my favorite quotes is from Daniel Willingham, where he said that memory is the residue of thought.

Susan Lambert:

I just love that .

Hugh Catts:

If you wanna remember something, you have to think about it. So if you don't know very much information, how do you think about it, while you read about it in the text? But the problem is you can only get so much of the information in that text into your memory, 'cause it's gotta go through a system we call working memory. And working memory is capacity-limited. You can only think about a few things at a time, right ? And the advantage to having background knowledge is when you're thinking about the new information. You can retrieve knowledge that you have, that's chunked into bigger bits of information, so it doesn't take up as much room, if you will, in your working memory. And you can use that to help you make sense of that incoming information and build a bigger memory. It's not the case that you could just go look it up on the internet and then think about it deeply and you'll have an understanding of it. Right? There's just not enough mental reserve to be able to build that meaning that quickly. So it helps tremendously that you have some knowledge about it beforehand. That knowledge gives you a place to put information. So when you read about something, it gives you storage for the information. It's kind of like a cubby hole that you put the mail in, in an office. It gives you a slip for that. New bits of information fits into "that old schema, if you will, or understanding of a particular topic. Some people refer to that as mental Velcro." I think it was Marilyn Adams who said that. It just sticks better if you already know it. The other thing that it it does for you is having knowledge makes you want more knowledge. We generally are more interested in something we already have some knowledge about to begin with. And the more expertise we get in it, the more likely we are to be interested in it. And we'll create a higher standard of coherence. We'll wanna get more information. The other thing it does is it helps us with inferencing. So authors seldom tell us everything we need to know to read — to understand — a text. It'd be boring if they told us every single detail that they have. They have to assume that the reader knows something. But if the reader doesn't know it, then they're not gonna be able to fill in the blanks of what they're reading. And that inferencing gets a lot of attention. But what people often miss about it is that most inferencing is automatic. It's not inferences that we have to think about. It's because our language system works such that soon as we read or hear a word, the activation within the middle model spreads to all related words. And it spreads to related words based upon how related they've been in the past. An example I use is when you hear the word "bank," it spreads to everything related to money, but it also spreads to the river. Even though "river" is a subordinate meaning of it. The idea is, that's why we're so good at language comprehension, is all this spreading activation happens immediately, based upon the reader's experience or the listener's experience with language. So inferencing is automatic most of the time, but there are those situations when it's not automatic, 'cause you have to think about it. You have to read that text and think, "All right, how does that go with that?" So if your listeners can bear a visual representation of — it's my favorite example. It's a Larson cartoon where it's inside a pet store, and over on one side of the room is a cat with two peg legs. And on the other side of the room is a bowl with a piranha in it. And it says, "Piranha, $29." You look at that image, right away, you don't necessarily get it. But you've got entrance, right?

Susan Lambert:

Right.

Hugh Catts:

And that's the way reading is. It takes a few minutes for you to kind of ... you know, Gary Larson's gonna have something in there that's kind of absurd <laugh> . So if you're a Larson fan, you look for it. If you're reading, that text may be kind of related to this, but you have to think about it. But the important thing about inferencing is you still gotta know it. You still have to know that a piranha could eat a cat's foot. Yeah. A cat could, like, put their foot in there. If you don't know that, all the inferencing strategy training in the world won't help you.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah. That's fascinating. And I've never thought about inferencing as being automatic. We often think about word recognition, building that to automaticity. But you're right. And I've done the same thing with cartoons, like, "Look at this cartoon!" But my question to people usually is, "What background knowledge do you need to have to understand this?" Right? But I've never made the connection that they're also automatically making inferences because they have the background knowledge to be able to do that quickly.

Hugh Catts:

Yeah. It just depends on how direct the inference is. In some cases, the author's written a text, so the inference is a little bit more difficult to make. And you know, as an author, that's a good thing. Why? Because you want your readers to think about what they're reading. So a little less coherence in a text, where you're not putting every little sentence together so that the reader can follow it all the way through, is not very interesting. And it doesn't tend to be remembered as well as if the text has a little bit of lack of coherence. That is, that the inference that you need to make, you don't learn about until a little bit later in the passage. That gets people to think more about that passage, and in doing so, remember it better.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah.

Hugh Catts:

But you still have to have the knowledge to be able to do that. You can't make an inference without the knowledge.

Susan Lambert:

Yeah. And that goes back to what we were talking about early in the episode: the importance of what knowledge or experiences kids bring to us in school, in kindergarten. Because it feels like broad background knowledge is pretty important to this comprehension process. And sometimes it feels like the chicken or the egg. Right? Because if I wanna learn about something, and listen and read about something, do I have to know something about it to actually gain this new knowledge? Or do I need a little bit of new knowledge to gain new knowledge?

Hugh Catts:

Yeah. That's a great, great issue. I mean, I've thought about that; a lot of people ask about that. But before we run out of time, I'll talk about it in the context of the core knowledge you mentioned. That program ... well, that's just one of a number of what we call content-rich literacy programs. And so, what they do is they teach literacy in the context of knowledge. It's knowledge that's spread out over long periods of time, that build on each other. So there's no chicken and egg situation here, 'cause you're doing both of them at the same time. So you're teaching kids about this subject matter at the same time you're teaching them how to extract that information from a text or how to write about that information or how to talk about that information in a dialogue. So you teach kids to read by talking about it, reading about it, watching YouTube videos about it, documentaries about it, and so forth. So, it puts literacy instruction in the context of knowledge. And that's what's the real benefit, I think, of the narrower view of reading is. What the narrower view of reading would suggest is that we teach kids to decode words within English Language Arts. After that, English Language Arts is over. What we then do is we teach comprehension. And fluency, fluency a little bit, probably, and English Language Arts too. We, we teach it within the subject matter. So, at the same time kids are learning to comprehend, they're learning about social studies, science, history, whatever it might be, in a way that builds from one instructional period to another instructional period. What I was telling you about learning about the habitat of dolphins helps you learn about the habitat of something else, what helps you learn is this ... and people that write those curricula have thought about, "What's the best way to teach this?" And what's strange to me is it's the same teacher in K through third grade or whatever. Why would that teacher have to think about teaching that within English Language Arts? Why don't we just have the block? We would have to have curricula that are better designed for that. Right? Most of the curricula now that are these content-rich curricula are ones that are built for English Language Arts. But there's no reason we couldn't go the other way. And the last thing I'll say that that's good for is that the focus changes to the purpose of school. And that's learning.

Susan Lambert:

Ah. Yeah.

Hugh Catts:

I mean, if you want to see where we should be going — or my opinion of where we should be going — sorry to feel so strongly about this!

Susan Lambert:

No, that's great.

Hugh Catts:

I'm getting to be the age where I could do that. It's that the content-rich literacy programs put the focus on the real purpose of school, and that's to learn — or when reading, to enjoy literacy. And that move us into the science of learning as opposed to the Science of Reading. Now, it would incorporate the Science of Reading within that. But that fits back to the idea about purpose. So kids would be learning science at the same time. They're learning how to read science and write about science.

Susan Lambert:

That's amazing. That's great. We forget about that, when we're teaching reading, that the purpose of reading is to learn something. Well, or enjoyment. But yes, learning is an important thing of going to school, isn't it? <laugh>

Hugh Catts:

Yep.

Susan Lambert:

Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. I just wonder if you have any thoughts, messages, or anything you'd like to leave with our listeners before we close out?

Hugh Catts:

I just, you know, suggest that we have to think a little bit more deeply in general about comprehension and start developing some models that will allow us to do that. To go beyond the skill-based approach to reading comprehension and, you know, focus on purpose. Why are we wanting kids to comprehend this particular text, and so forth? And I think when we do that we'll realize that we might go about teaching differently, depending upon that purpose and that particular topic.

Susan Lambert:

Well, Dr. Hugh Catts, thank you for the work that you're doing. And again, thank you for joining us on today's episode. We really appreciate it.

Hugh Catts:

Yeah, I appreciate, appreciate you had me. That was fun. Thank you.

Susan Lambert:

That was Dr. Hugh Catts, professor of the School of Communication Science and Disorders at Florida State University. Please check out the show notes to read more from Dr. Catts on comprehension and the Simple View of Reading. Next time on the show, literacy specialist and educational consultant, Lori Josephson will discuss her new book, Calling All Neurons: How Reading and Spelling Happen. She will also tackle some of our listener mailbag questions, including how to remediate upper elementary kids who lack foundational reading skills.

Lori Josephson:

I firmly believe that no matter how old you are, you still need to learn the same information. Let's let that sink in. If someone does not — if an individual in middle school or high school does not have the foundational skills, your memory is only so big.

Susan Lambert:

That's coming up next time. And submit your own Science of Reading questions by visiting Amplify.com/SORmailbag. By submitting a question, you could also win a visit from me to your school. And if you're enjoying our reading reboot, please consider telling a friend or colleague about the show. We're grateful for any help spreading the word. You can join the conversation about this episode in our Facebook discussion group, Science of Reading: The Community. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you so much for listening.