Science of Reading: The Podcast

S10 E13: Building blocks for deep comprehension, with Susan Lambert

• Amplify Education • Season 10 • Episode 13

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0:00 | 24:53

Host Susan Lambert hits the home stretch of her comprehension-focused season of Science of Reading: The Podcast with a reflective episode based on her presentation at this year's Plain Talk About Literacy and Learning conference. Instead of being joined by a guest, Susan breaks down some of her biggest takeaways from this season—explaining how reading comprehension is far more intricate than the ability to decode words on a page, and detailing how the expert guests this season helped illustrate all of comprehension's amazing complexities. Whether you hear her Plain Talk conversation live or not, this episode captures those same insights in a format you can revisit anytime.

Show notes:

Quotes:

"Comprehension is an active process. It usually requires active engagement and effect from the reader." —Susan Lambert

"Comprehension is an integration of knowledge and experience that requires the reader to connect new information from the text with their own knowledge and experiences." —Susan Lambert

"Comprehension is dynamic and ongoing. It requires the reader to update and revise their understanding as new information is encountered." —Susan Lambert

"What constitutes good comprehension is relative, and it depends on who is reading the text and why they're reading it." —Susan Lambert

"The components of comprehension don't develop in isolation. They bootstrap and support each other throughout a reader's development." —Susan Lambert

Timestamps*:
00:00 Introduction: Building blocks for deep comprehension
04:00 Common themes from guests' definitions of comprehension
07:00 The simple view of reading
10:00 Oral language, syntax and fluency
13:00 Syntax is the critical missing piece needed to improve reading comprehension outcomes
16:00 Fluency is a critical but often overlooked prerequisite to reading comprehension
21:00 The components of comprehension don't develop in isolation
22:00 Closing thoughts o our comprehension focused season
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute


[00:00:00] Susan Lambert: Hey listeners! This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to a very special edition of Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. Across our 12 episodes this season, I've learned so much about comprehension that that's going to be the theme of my upcoming session at the Plain Talk About Literacy and Learning Conference this year. If you can't be there, it's OK. I am going to talk about some of those biggest learnings in this episode. You know, comprehension feels like this scary kind of idea that is just an outcome and just happens magically, and it doesn't. So on this episode, I'm not going to be joined by any guests. Instead, I'm bringing you some of my own biggest takeaways, and here's where I want to start. So first, comprehension, it's what's come to be known as one of the Big 5. You remember this from the National Reading Panel report, the five pillars of literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. And during Season 9, Hugh Catts joined us to talk about comprehension, to help us really understand that comprehension is not a skill. He also talked about the unintended consequences of graphics that depict the Big 5 as different pillars: a pillar of phonemic awareness, a pillar of phonics, a pillar of fluency, a pillar of vocabulary, and a pillar of comprehension.

[00:01:31] Hugh Catts: 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 as mentioned explicitly in there. And that's another place we can get the impression that teachers ought to work on phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. And the reason they appear as independent categories is because 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.

[00:02:09] Susan Lambert: If you just think about comprehension as its own pillar, or its own part of instruction, you, first of all, forget all of these other things actually funnel into the process of comprehension. And comprehension is so big that you can't just focus on it as an individual thing. So, if comprehension isn't a skill, what exactly is it? Before we dig in and unpack that a little bit, I wanna talk about Season 10, our guests, and what we ask them to do. For each guest, we ask them to provide their own definition of comprehension. And it's really interesting some of the themes that have emerged. But before we get there, during my Plain Talk session, I'm going to ask participants to stop here and write their own definition of comprehension. Maybe you might want to pause the podcast here and try that for yourself, and then you can compare your definition with what our guests actually shared. OK. Now that you've had a chance to think of your own definition, let's talk through some of those common themes. First, comprehension is an ACTIVE process. It actually requires active engagement and effort from the reader. The reader has to actively construct meaning, and not just extract meaning from the text. And I think maybe you heard me say the word active several times there. So it's not just the end result of reading, it's actually what happens during that reading process. Number two, comprehension is a multi-layered construction of meaning. What's that mean? It requires the reader to build an understanding at the word level, the sentence level, the paragraph level, and the overall level of the text. And if understanding breaks down at any one of those levels, your overall comprehension is going to be impacted. So an example of this would be when you're reading and you come to a word you don't recognize, either because you can't sound that word out or you don't understand the meaning of it, you have to stop and think about what that word is. And when you make that stop, you lose all of the context from what you were reading before. Number three, comprehension is an integration of knowledge and experience, and that requires the reader to connect new information from the text with their own knowledge and experiences. So, a good example of this would be I have a lot of background knowledge about early literacy. And so, when I read texts or research articles about early literacy, my background knowledge will come into play in terms of my comprehension. Number four, comprehension is dynamic and ongoing. It requires the reader to update and revise their understanding as new information is encountered. It's sort of a continuous process that occurs throughout the reader's encounter with a text. Number five, comprehension actually goes beyond just literal understanding. It requires the reader to make inferences, to understand implied meanings, and to grasp deeper themes. And last, number six, comprehension is variable and personalized. And I think this is really important because what constitutes good comprehension is relative, and it depends on who is reading the text and why they're reading it. Sometimes I'll read a text to get new information. Sometimes I'll just summarize a text just to get the gist. These common themes actually suggest a consensus that comprehension is a complex, active, and highly individualized cognitive process that involves much more than simply decoding words on a page. Comprehension is complex. Ironically, we kicked off our comprehension season by inviting Dr. Wesley Hoover on to talk about the Simple View of Reading. And the reason we did that is because we know that there are many factors that contribute to overall reading comprehension, and the Simple View of Reading is a great way to think about those cognitive capacities. It represents reading comprehension as the product of two important cognitive capacities: word recognition, which is just getting the words off the page quickly and accurately, and language comprehension, which is deriving both literal and inferential meaning from the text. But the key prediction from this model is that strong reading comprehension is only achieved when readers are strong in both of those components. And reading comprehension suffers when readers are weak in one or both of the components. But wait, didn't we just talk about how complex comprehension is? And now we're talking about the Simple View of Reading. Let's hear Dr. Hoover explain just a little bit more about this.

[00:07:38] Wesley Hoover: The Simple View doesn't say that reading is NOT complex, it just says the complexity is housed in two factors: word recognition and language comprehension. And both of those are complex. It's not that the Simple View is stating that reading is not complex. It's just saying that that complexity is in two factors.

[00:07:57] Susan Lambert: Dr. Hoover's explanation of this is so important. And I wanna tell a little bit of a story. I remember when I first started talking about the Simple View of Reading in presentations, and this was years ago that people weren't really that familiar with the Simple View of Reading, and so I think it offended a lot of people. Because the message that was being communicated is that this is simple. Have you ever been in the classroom and tried to teach reading? It is HARD to teach reading. The idea here that he communicated is the simple part is that there are two buckets of information. There's language comprehension and there's word recognition. Both of these are capacities, cognitive capacities, that need to be developed. And when we're talking about developing anything within our brain, it is very complex. It's just the model presents the complexities of reading in two buckets of information. And then another common misconception about the Simple View of Reading model is that it's a developmental model. Meaning that first you have to learn word recognition and then you get language comprehension, and that's just not true. The model is concurrent, and that means both factors are important in reading comprehension. In order to comprehend, or make meaning of a text, you have to lift the words off the page AND you have to understand what those things mean. OK. We've covered a lot of ground already, but there are three important topics, really important, often overlooked, when we're thinking about influences on reading comprehension: oral language, syntax, and fluency. And we've covered each of these in Season 10. I really wanna start with oral language, because it IS a critical foundation for reading development. And that was the heart of Season 10, Episode 10. And according to the research presented by Dr. Charles Hulme and MaryKate DeSantis, oral language skills, which include both understanding what's said to you and expressing ideas in spoken language, serve as the foundational bedrock for all reading development. Dr. Hulme has a model called Reading is Language Model, and it extends beyond the Simple View of Reading to show that early preschool language skills actually predict and form the foundation for both components of reading. So decoding skills or word recognition skills are skills that you can learn to mastery or to automaticity. Oral language skills, on the other hand, are unconstrained, which means they continue to develop throughout our lifetime and represent the primary driver of reading comprehension growth. And while there's a common misconception that language always develops naturally, children arrive at school with very different language experiences. Many students benefit from additional language support. Teachers should provide explicit instruction in vocabulary, making inferences, sentence structures, and storytelling skills as core parts of daily learning. Large research studies demonstrate that strong language instruction creates lasting improvement in language skills, reading ability, comprehension, and even classroom behaviors. As DeSantis emphasized ...

[00:11:42] MaryKate DeSantis: The research is just so clear that, you know, language is not optional for literacy. When we treat it as foundational, that's when we will give more students access to success.

[00:11:55] Susan Lambert: So during the season, we explicitly dedicated two episodes to syntax. The sentence-level understanding is SO critical to overall comprehension, because if you don't understand what a sentence is saying, you can't connect those sentences together to get an overall understanding. And so syntax represents the critical missing piece needed to really improve reading comprehension outcomes. Think about it as a bridge between your individual word recognition and text comprehension, and, you know, it needs to be explicitly taught from the earliest grades. Let's hear a little bit from Julie Van Dyke.

[00:12:38] Julie Van Dyke: We need to move the needle on the nation's report card, right? We still have two thirds of students who are unable to read at what we call proficient. And I think the only way that we can really get that number to be closer to the 95% of what we really wanna see is to do something new. And syntax is the new thing.

[00:12:58] Susan Lambert: And if you think about moving the needle on, let's say, these fourth grade reading scores in NAEP, we know that when kids get to third grade, reading complexity starts to increase rapidly. And if they're not able to understand at the sentence level, or understand how those words are put together to make sentences, as that rigor and complexity of text increases, we're more and more squeezing students out from the process of reading comprehension. Because they can recognize the words on the page, but they're not understanding them when we put those words together. One of the things that we have historically done is think about teaching grammar. What's a noun? What's a verb? Let's label those. And according to Nancy Chapel Eberhardt, that might not be the best way to approach it. She emphasizes that, really, syntax instruction should focus on function first. Teaching students how to ask, "Hmm, what question does this word or phrase answer?" You know, those who, what, did what, when, where, how?

[00:14:10] Nancy Chapel Eberhardt: Start teaching this by thinking about the most essential building block. I need a who or what and I need a did what. We can always be pulling out of the text the who and the did whats. Let's make a list of the people or places and things. And then let's list some actions. Once we do that, we can build some sentences. Now let's put those together and review what we read or listened to by building a sentence. If we are aware that we need to have kids paying attention to and learning about these building blocks, and that these building blocks can be put together to create a sentence, then they're on their way to learning about syntax.

[00:14:51] Susan Lambert: What a great example! VERY easy to implement. You can apply that over and over and over again, and all of a sudden students are going to start paying attention to what's happening at the sentence level within text, and then understand how to use that information then to write a summary of something that just happened. What a great way to teach syntax without using any labels. It makes the systematic and rule-based aspect of language as teachable as phonics. And this approach is particularly crucial since written language contains far more complex syntactic structures than oral language. And it's really important for multilingual learners, who bring different syntactic structures from their first languages, and also students with developmental language disorders, who just struggle with sentence-level processing. Finally, let's tackle fluency. And when thinking about fluency, I like to remember and remind folks that fluency actually involves three different dimensions: accuracy, rate, and prosody. So, the first dimension is accuracy. And so, you have to accurately read the words on the page. And if you can't accurately read those, you stop during the reading process, right? The second sort of dimension of fluency that's really important is called rate. And so, if you read too slowly or if you read too fast, actually, you're not able to make connections between words and between sentences. And then this idea of prosody or expression. So, please don't just think that fluency equals expressive reading. That's part of it, but not the whole story. So early in this season, Episode 3, Doug Lemov joined us to talk about a really important chapter from his latest book, "The Teach Like A Champion Guide to The Science of Reading." So what does he talk about? And according to Lemov, fluency represents a critical but often overlooked prerequisite to reading comprehension. And he really believes this has become an epidemic in middle and high school classrooms. Because when students aren't fluent, they have to use their limited working memory to decode words rather than be able to engage in deep thinking, analysis, and meaning-making that comprehension actually requires. He cites a powerful correlation between fluency and comprehension. There's a 50% to 60% correlation between the two, and that's pretty high. The more fluent you are, the better you comprehend. The better you comprehend, the more fluent you are. He also explains that about 40% to 80% of students in his view, in the upper grades are disfluent. And this really creates a situation where comprehension instruction is really ineffective, because students don't have those foundational skills needed to access it. Remember those three dimensions of fluency: accuracy, automaticity, and prosody. Those dimensions are generally developmental, meaning that you have to accurately read the sound spelling patterns in words, then practice those patterns to become automatic. And without accuracy and automaticity, prosody or expression is almost impossible. So reading with prosody demonstrates understanding by making meaning audible through the expression. And, interestingly, fluency and comprehension have a bi-directional relationship. Remember that correlation we were talking about? So fluency instruction, taking into account all of its dimensions, is essential for unlocking students' capacity for deep, meaningful reading experiences that extend beyond surface-level understanding. Let's hear a little bit more about that from Doug.

[00:19:10] Doug Lemov: When we think consciously about something, we're using our working memory. It's our human superpower. It's where we have, you know, creative thoughts, deeper thoughts, analytical thoughts, perceptions about the world. Hmm, that's such a fascinating word to use. The problem with working memory is that it's tiny, and it's easily overloaded. You can really only think about one thing, maybe two things, at a time using working memory. So everything that I'm using my working memory for that is not deep thinking about the text, uh, is gonna keep me from doing that deep thinking of the text. If you can't read at the speed of sight, you must use your working memory to make sense of the text. If your working memory is making sense of the text, it can't be used for comprehension. It can't be used for perception. It can't be used for insight. So when we have kids who we otherwise find to be brilliant and insightful and quick-witted, and suddenly we put a text in front of them and all of that breaks down and it falls apart, the first question we should ask ourselves is, what could be disrupting their working memory? And the answer is, it's often fluency. Fluency is a prerequisite to comprehension. And so, if you're not a fluent reader, you can't be a deep reader.

[00:20:13] Susan Lambert: I think this is really important what he says about fluency. Accuracy, rate, and prosody all lead to this idea of fluency. And when you are a fluent reader, your comprehension is better. And when your comprehension is better, it also impacts your fluency. So, as we've explored through Season 10, achieving strong reading comprehension requires explicit attention to multiple, interconnected, INTERCONNECTED, factors. From the foundational or language skills that predict both decoding and comprehension development. To syntactic knowledge that really help readers parse complex sentences word by word. To fluency that frees up cognitive resources for deep meaning-making. All of this works together in this beautifully complex, cognitive process we call reading comprehension. And I think what makes all of this so compelling is that it reveals that the components of comprehension don't develop in isolation. But they bootstrap and support each other throughout a reader's development, with early oral language experiences laying the groundwork for later success with complex written text. For educators, a takeaway is moving beyond just isolated skill instruction and really embracing an integrated approach that recognizes the importance of language comprehension and word recognition. And the research is really clear: when we look at these elements, both elements, as foundational and interconnected rather than separate, we give all students, especially those from diverse linguistic backgrounds or with language-based learning differences, we give them all the comprehensive support they need to become, not just decoders of text, but true comprehenders who can engage deeply and meaningfully with the written word. Thanks for listening to this very special episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast. All of the conversations I just talked about are available right now, for free, in the Science of Reading: The Podcast feed. For even more great resources on comprehension, including ebooks and on-demand professional learning, visit at.amplify.com/comprehension101. We'll also have a link in the show notes. Next time, we're closing out Season 10 by addressing some of your comprehension questions. Science of Reading: The Podcast is brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thank you to everyone at Plain Talk for having me back. And, as always, thanks so much for listening.