Science of Reading: The Podcast

S10 E14: Your comprehension questions answered, with Nathaniel Swain, Ph.D.

• Amplify Education • Season 10 • Episode 14

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In this episode of Science of Reading: The Podcast, returning guest, Nathaniel Swain, Ph.D., joins Susan Lambert to close out the season by answering thoughtful and thought-provoking comprehension questions submitted by listeners. Nathaniel and Susan answer questions about comprehension strategies, the relationship between comprehension and memorization, and how to shift the mindset amongst your teaching colleagues to help them understand comprehension.

Show notes:

Quotes:

"What we're trying to do is create meaningful text experiences. ... The strategies are background, the powerhouse behind the work we're doing, but the star of the show is the language and the text." —Nathaniel Swain, Ph.D.

"If you ever feel like your comprehension work only allows students to produce or perform something on a particular day in which you've just read that text, then you may be missing the opportunity to weave meaningful text together." —Nathaniel Swain, Ph.D.

"When we're teaching reading comprehension, really let the text be the center of what we're doing." —Susan Lambert

Timestamps*:
00:00 Introduction: Answering listeners' questions on comprehension
03:00 The difference between oral and written language as it relates to comprehension
06:00 Supporting students who read fluently but struggle with comprehension
16:00 The role of comprehension strategies
21:00 Oral language development and comprehension
28:00 The connection between memory and comprehension
36:00 How to help colleagues adjust their mindset on comprehension
42:00 Overall takeaways from this batch of mailbag questions
*Timestamps are approximate, rounded to nearest minute

[00:00:00] Nathaniel Swain: I think there's an opportunity to move the whole profession forward, in thinking that our role is really about having rich text experiences that DO enrich the lives of our students.

[00:00:13] Susan Lambert: This is Susan Lambert, and welcome to Science of Reading: The Podcast from Amplify. Seven months ago, we started this deep dive into comprehension. And I'm so grateful to our listeners who have been part of this journey. We've gotten so many great questions from you all throughout the season that we're closing it out with another mailbag episode. Thanks to everyone who submitted questions. I wish we had time to address every single one, but we're going to get to a handful of them today. To help me out, I'm joined again by Dr. Nathaniel Swain. Teacher, instructional coach, and writer. You may remember that Dr. Swain joined the show last June to discuss his wonderful book, "Harnessing the Science of Learning." And today, he's going to help us tackle your comprehension questions on everything from oral language to comprehension strategies to memory. Let's get right to it. Dr. Nathaniel Swain, welcome back to the podcast!

[00:01:14] Nathaniel Swain: Thank you so much, Susan! It's a great pleasure to be here, always.

[00:01:18] Susan Lambert: It is so fun, because we are closing out Season 10, which has been all about comprehension. And this is one of my favorite episodes, so thanks for joining on the mailbag episode.

[00:01:28] Nathaniel Swain: I think we'll have a lot of fun.

[00:01:30] Susan Lambert: I think we will. You know what, I'd really love to start our mailbag episode with a question from Ben in the UK. He actually sent us a little bit of a recording. So, let's listen to what Ben's question is.

[00:01:44] Ben Rogers: Hi Susan. My name is Ben Rogers. I'm a physics teacher from the UK. I've got a question for you on comprehension. When my students are reading a text, the text will be well written. It will have clear, complete sentences. The language will be relatively sophisticated compared to the language I'll use when I'm explaining the same concept to the students. I will use probably fragments of sentences. I will use hand gestures. I'll use eye contact. I'll use questioning. Much more interactive. What's the difference on the effect in what's going on in my students' brains when they're reading a text compared to when they're listening to me explain a text or explain a concept? Really enjoyed the show. Thank you very much! Take care.

[00:02:27] Susan Lambert: That's a great question, isn't it Nate?

[00:02:30] Nathaniel Swain: Definitely! And I think it speaks to the wonderings that many teachers might have about the differences between oral and written language. And we can answer it just by, sort of, laying out some of those foundations for people who might not be aware. So what, uh, Ben was getting at there was that oral language does include a lot of abandoned utterances is what it's called. So, you start a sentence, then you realize, actually I've got another sentence that I need to, sort of, speak about so I might just, oh, actually, um, it's really an example of, and you just keep, sort of, abandoning those little sentences like that. And, um, this is common amongst speech. And with the use of gestures and facial expressions and other sorts of information, such as pointing to materials or a diagram, actually the use of oral language still is a fine way to get information. Humans, after all, have been using that since the dawn of human, sort of, evolution. And oral language is a good way of getting that across. However, what Ben's getting at there is really interesting in that there's a different set, or a different requirement, of the formality of language that'll happen when you're then reading a text that's been written down. When an author makes a decision to write a text, they have to represent some of those nuances that we could get across with a bit of personality, and facial expressions, and gestures. They have to do that just with language and written language conventions, such as punctuation, paragraphing, subheadings, and the like. So, I think you can, um, use both forms of, um, communication to get across that physics content, or any disciplinary content from your subject could work. But one of the benefits of integrating some reading comprehension in the work that you're doing with students is that you're also giving them content that is in the form that helps them improve their reading comprehension at the same time. So what did you think, Susan?

[00:04:12] Susan Lambert: Well, I thought it was really interesting, because yes, the differences between oral language and written language, and right now I'm using my hands for the listeners that can't see it, so, right, it just seems to be natural that you do some of those things. But, also, I love what you said about how important it is to help students actually do that reading comprehension element of it. To understand text and to gain new knowledge. But it also reminds me of the importance of oral language, or discourse, or discussion. Because it seems to me, when you are reading a text to students or explaining a concept, that this idea of scaffolds, like oral language can serve as a really great scaffold that might be missing from what we're doing, or what the author is communicating in written text. So, it made me think of that right away, or the importance of both, you know, incorporating both things to be able to help students get access to comprehension.

[00:05:04] Nathaniel Swain: And to build upon that, I would say that the best of both worlds would be really excellent, efficient uses of oral language, ideally without a whole lot of maze-y or abandoned sort of speech. So, sometimes I encourage teachers to write down their definitions, or explanations, in advance so that at least they have some dot points, or a clear sort of explanation, to work from. But then if they do incorporate some reading comprehension, not just requiring students to read it and move on, but to do that oral language work ...

[00:05:31] Susan Lambert: Yes.

[00:05:31] Nathaniel Swain: Around the text, which then yeah, brings it to life or helps facilitate that comprehension, so that students, when they read similar text in the future, they've got some of those strategies and tools to play with.

[00:05:42] Susan Lambert: Yeah, very good point. Very good point. All right, we're gonna move on to another question. That one was really fun. We've got more to cover. And this one is from Linda, and she is a coach specialist actually in New Zealand. So from your neck of the woods.

[00:05:56] Nathaniel Swain: There you go.

[00:05:56] Susan Lambert: She said "Hi. I have students at year 10 who can read a page of a novel fluently, but then say they have no understanding of what they just read. The material is at an appropriate level, but they take nothing in. We know that a good reader critiques what they're reading, through forming questions as they read. However, if their life experiences are limited, prior knowledge, and with the exception of building vocabulary, how do we develop comprehension of the text?" Oh my gosh. There's a few things to unpack in there, isn't there?

[00:06:29] Nathaniel Swain: There is. And to begin with, I would say it's very possible and common that students will develop fluent reading but then may exhibit signs of not fully comprehending what they've read. And I think adults experience this themselves when, you know, late at night, you're reading a page of a book and then you realize you haven't been listening to yourself reading, even though it's been very clear in your head. So you've been thinking about your shopping list, or what's on for tomorrow, and you actually needed to have been paying attention. So, part of it I think could be that, is that students, if they're just trying to get the words right and reading fluently, say when they're reading out loud, it could be even more sort of prominent for older students, that maybe they're not switching into what the reading's about. However, it also could be, as Linda is getting at there, as she's saying that potentially they might not have the background knowledge, and maybe the other factor apart from vocabulary might be the syntax. So, the sentence structure. And one of the things that I think, just as a general principle, which I love from Margaret McKeown and Isabel Beck's work around questioning the author, is that frequent pausing through reading, um, pausing and checking what's just happened here, or what's the author just said, is one of the best ways to get out of that habit of just reading for speed or reading for expression. And through that process, if you don't understand, realizing you need to go back and reread, as well as look for other sources of information outside the text. 'Cause maybe there isn't the background knowledge, or the syntactical awareness, in order to really break that text down. So a close read might be helpful too.

[00:07:51] Susan Lambert: Yeah, that's a good point. And what this made me think of too is she's particularly talking about a novel, but sometimes this is true, right, like in whether it's literary text or informational text, is this idea of establishing a purpose for reading. Are we helping students engage in this text ,or are we helping students understand what they're looking or reading for? I notice I have to do that for myself too, like your great example of reading at night. Well, I can do this often, right? You're just reading ...

[00:08:19] Nathaniel Swain: without really taking it in.

[00:08:20] Susan Lambert: Yes! So, I do think, like, thinking about setting that purpose for reading, and I love that idea of stopping at points to make sure that the comprehension and awareness is there. And she did mention, like, forming questions as you read.

[00:08:34] Nathaniel Swain: Yeah.

[00:08:34] Susan Lambert: And so, it's pretty hard to form questions as you read if you're not, like, engaging or understanding.

[00:08:39] Nathaniel Swain: And I think that's where questioning author is such a useful set of strategies. It's very simple. There's initiating queries, there's follow-up queries, and there's narrative-specific queries. And these are interspersed with that rich discussion.

[00:08:50] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:08:51] Nathaniel Swain: The teacher's job basically is to model what a reader would do if they were doing this unconsciously, or in their own head, for example. And through that process students can see if you encounter some text that you haven't understood, obviously first step, make sure you've been listening to yourself read. And if not, go back and reread that segment. And if you need to read more closely, thinking about alternative interpretations, inviting some of that inferencing, as well as trying to bring together and synthesize different parts of the text. So, all of that happens because you're trying to build that situation model, or the mental model, of the text.

[00:09:24] Susan Lambert: That's a really good point, the importance of syntax there. We covered a lot of syntax on this season of the podcast, like all about comprehension. And a couple of back to back episodes that were really important, because I think sometimes we forget that you can be just reading along and you can read all the words and you might even be able to read, like you said, with fluency, but if you're not understanding between a sentence or between sentences, so if anything breaks down at that level, that's another really, really good point.

[00:09:51] Nathaniel Swain: Mm, definitely.

[00:09:53] Susan Lambert: OK, so we actually got one mailbag question that was specifically for Dr. Wesley Hoover. He was amazing, by the way, on our podcast. He is amazing. He helps explain things so well, and he helped kick us off on this the season when he talked about the Simple View of Reading. And, I don't know, that episode, to me, brought some misconceptions for us that I had not thought of. And, I really, I learned a lot from that. Anyway, so it was Crystal from Texas and her question was about Dr. Hoover's statement that reading comprehension is the same thing as language comprehension, it's just that it's done with respect to print rather than phonology, and rather than just listening. And so, he contends it requires the same set of skills. So, Crystal asks whether we should read text aloud to students when we're assessing comprehension-based standards, so that we can measure their language comprehension without the barrier of decoding? Dr. Hoover was nice enough to record a response. Let's just listen to a bit of that.

[00:10:58] Wesley Hoover: As the question suggests, there is a relationship here in the Simple View between language comprehension and reading comprehension. Both tap the same comprehension ability. The difference is one's accessed through the ear and one's accessed through the eye. One by listening, one by reading. So, if your assessment, if the standard you're attesting, is reading comprehension, and the data are gonna be used to try and understand whether a student can read, then it's very important that that student actually read the text. And then reading the text, people will be able to understand whether or not reading comprehension is a problem for this particular student. If you do that, then the data can be used appropriately to assess whether or not that student has a reading comprehension difficulty. If, however, you give the accommodation and read the text to the student, then, as the questioner suggests, you're not testing reading comprehension anymore, you're testing language comprehension.

[00:12:03] Susan Lambert: So, that's just part of Dr. Hoover's response. And listeners, you can check out his complete answer on our companion YouTube channel, Advice for the Literacy Classroom, which we've linked in the show notes. I wonder, like, this reminds me a little bit of this differences between oral language and written language, but I wonder if you have anything else you wanna add to that response that Dr. Hoover gave.

[00:12:25] Nathaniel Swain: I think it speaks to the value that the Simple View of Reading really provides when we are thinking of that differential sort of diagnosis of what might be causing these reading difficulties. And, uh, psychologists or speech pathologists, which, um, I used to make these kinds of assessments when I was a speech language pathologist before being a teacher. And just being able to know, like, is the core of this reading comprehension difficulty about decoding? Is it about fluency? Is it about accurate word recognition? Or is it about language comprehension? Is it difficulty with syntax, or vocabulary, or text? Um, sort of discourse-level language difficulties. And if that's the case, that should be visible in the oral, sort of, part of the system. So, if you do a similar assessment, or if you do a formal language assessment that a speech language pathologist may do, then you can get a sense of whether there's actually a language deficit or language difference or language difficulty there. And all of those are slightly different. And I think this is helpful because the ultimate aim is reading comprehension.

[00:13:23] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:13:23] Nathaniel Swain: But how you get students there might be different. And for those students that have just decoding difficulties, and language is, sort of, unaffected and going quite well, it's really that, you know, that work on fluency and um, uh, automatic word recognition or the phonics and the phonemic awareness that gets you there, that will actually make the biggest difference. Whereas if the students that have a language-comprehension difficulty, they're having trouble actually understanding spoken language as well as written when they're trying to read it, then there's actually a heap of work to do in that, sort of, language development space around vocabulary, syntax, and discourse-level language. And, sometimes it's both. So, you need to actually, work with students on both of those sides of the Simple View in order to address an underlying difficulty that's to do with both. And I think different students at different stages in their development will just require different amounts. But what's great about really good literacy programming when you have a well-rounded literacy block, you actually do hit at these different areas. And in lieu of getting students to independently practice their comprehension skills or comprehension abilities when they're reading by themselves, read-alouds and shared reading experiences stand in for those and, uh, create those rich language learning offerings as a way of practicing and leveraging the oral language, sort of, development opportunity that's there. So, even though they can't read the text yet, you should still be developing oral language. So that it's getting ready to address any underlying language difficulties that might be there.

[00:14:47] Susan Lambert: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'm gonna just reiterate what you said about the power of the Simple View framework as a reminder of the two elements that go into the ultimate goal of reading comprehension. I know sometimes people get confused, because it says language comprehension and reading comprehension. What's the difference between comprehension? But just thinking about language comprehension as being able to understand the language without the print sitting in front of you. So, it is a good little way to think through those elements that we need to provide our students with that ultimate goal of reading comprehension. And we did learn a lot this season over the importance of language development and early language development, oral development in the youngest of our students. So, that's amazing. Again, his explanation of the Simple View is just fabulous.

[00:15:38] Nathaniel Swain: Episode to go back and listen to, yeah.

[00:15:39] Susan Lambert: It is. It's a great one to listen to. We are going to go to a coach specialist here from the United States, from the state of Tennessee. And she wrote in the early grades, and she's thinking grades one and two, we balance teaching decoding skills with teaching comprehension. There's that Simple View again.

[00:15:58] Nathaniel Swain: Mm.

[00:15:58] Susan Lambert: We also know building knowledge, increasing vocabulary, developing oral language. We also know we have never enough time.

[00:16:07] Nathaniel Swain: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:07] Susan Lambert: What comprehension strategy would give us the biggest bang for our buck?

[00:16:12] Nathaniel Swain: I think if you're trying to boil it down to just one strategy, then you might have oversimplified, I guess, the work. Because it's language development at many different levels. And ...

[00:16:22] Susan Lambert: Yeah.

[00:16:22] Nathaniel Swain: It's meaningful language and literacy experiences is what you're aiming for, to develop that comprehension set. So, there isn't just one strategy you can really rehearse that will just fix everything. And you can't really replace the fact that you do need to invest time in rich learning experiences, where you're reading aloud text, you're unpacking a text, you are writing about and/or getting students to draw about that text. You're discussing the characters, the key vocabulary, and so on. And I think if you do it really well, and bring it together, it feels like you're ticking a lot of boxes all at once, because when you do it a quality read-aloud and do those follow-up text experiences, even when they can't necessarily write, they might be drawing or they might be creating something that represents that world of the text from fiction or nonfiction, then you do feel like you're making a lot of headway. I think if you worry so much about which strategy and, therefore, reduce the amount of text exposure to just short paragraphs to practice that strategy, then I think you might miss out on the opportunity to be building up that text representation, which is that mental or situation model. So, really the goal of developing a well-rounded approach to the reading comprehension is that they do have adequate time for phonics, and for phonemic awareness and fluency, and developing that sense of accuracy and speed and prosody and things like that in their reading, but also having those rich text experiences. Eventually, they come together, and they start reading those texts by themselves. But, initially, it will be quite separate. If you were gonna choose one though, I'll just be a little bit cheeky here and say, um, one comprehension strategy that I think is completely underrated but that actually brings many together is called comprehension monitoring. And that links back to that question, the author approach, if you haven't seen it before. So, it's really just pausing and saying, "What just happened here? What have I just read? Or what's going on so far? Um, where might we be going next?" And that very simple one just allows students to not read for speed, but to actually read for that understanding and really trying to stay with the author in the text. So, I think if you're gonna choose one, comprehension monitoring might be the one that brings it all together. But it's all about rich literacy and reading experiences.

[00:18:26] Susan Lambert: Yeah, and just this understanding, and I hope our listeners got this, sort of, broad understanding, that there are so many things that lead to, like, strong comprehension. And I mean, obviously it starts with the basis of really understanding the words on the page and being able to lift those words off the page. The other thing I was thinking about, and I wonder how you think about this one, is that, you know, not all strategies well, except for metacognition, I love this idea of, like, sort of, monitoring what you're reading. Because that's applicable to anything that you read. And, sometimes a certain comprehension strategy, and I'm using air quotes here, doesn't apply to all texts that you're reading.

[00:19:07] Nathaniel Swain: Yeah.

[00:19:07] Susan Lambert: So it may be appropriate to compare and contrast if you're reading something that is in that world of comparing and contrasting, but it might not be relative if you're reading a novel. Right. That might be something else that you have to do, but I don't know. I think you get the award, because I think you did pick the one that can be applicable to all text, yeah.

[00:19:26] Nathaniel Swain: Well I think, you know, predicting, for, example is great. But maybe predicting is most useful in a narrative genre, where there is a sense of story that's progressing. Whereas if it's nonfiction, you may want to predict what the next argument might be, but actually it's not usually how we interact. And as you said before, Susan, it's the purpose which you are reading for can help dictate what strategy is most useful. So, if you're reading to critique someone's argument, you're going to be trying to lay out and summarize, or synthesize, the main idea of each of those paragraphs. If you're reading a story, then you're hoping to really understand the world of the characters, predict what might happen next, and also understand the potential foreshadowing that might be there. There might not be an exact strategy for that, but eventually it all becomes about the text. So, the text dictates how well we can get students practicing these kinds of skills. And, also, the choice of text that you use, and how rich it is, and how much you discuss it then becomes the most important thing rather than any one strategy, I think.

[00:20:21] Susan Lambert: Yeah, it's a great reminder that when we're teaching reading comprehension, really let the text be the center, right? The text be the center of what we're doing, and helping to support students in being able to engage and deeply comprehending that text. That was a great question Ally. Thanks for that question. OK. Let's stick with the topic of language in response to our recent episode about the importance of developing students' language. Another listener wrote, for what grade level teacher is this most important? I teach seventh and eighth grade literature and composition, and so comprehension is of great interest to me. I also work with multilingual learners and wonder how this would apply to them though they may be older while working on their oral speech. In other words, how do you think about developing oral language with adolescent learners or multilingual learners?

[00:21:15] Nathaniel Swain: Mm-hmm. Mm. Look, I think back to what we talked about just before. Really anchoring your literacy programming with rich text that you are unpacking with students. The, the importance of, say, novel studies. It might be poetry studies that you're looking at. It could be deep dives into some content. If it's literature, obviously you're looking at the world of literature, but in other subjects, you're looking at the content of those subjects such as social studies, and science, and the like. And essentially grounding what you're doing in those rich text experiences, because that creates the anchor for all of that other work. And if you are developing oral language with older adolescent learners, those texts and units of study that you're looking at, so content-rich or knowledge-rich units, are really useful. Because they allow us to continually revisit key ideas and key parts of the world of the story, if it's a fiction, a text, so that we can essentially give lots of rich language exposure. It's tempting, for example, to create a list of tier two words.

[00:22:14] Susan Lambert: Right.

[00:22:15] Nathaniel Swain: In seventh and eighth grade we're just gonna say, we're gonna make sure that they've got these tier two or tier three words, and we're just gonna drill them in them each week and teach them really explicitly. The problem with treating language as if it's just a set of tick boxes that you can just tick off, is that students need a meaningful reason to hold on to that language. And they have to use it or they'll lose it. So, when you invest instead in the text that you're reading, the nonfiction or fiction text that you're bringing to life and using as a springboard for discussion, or start of a rich exploration that you might be doing, essentially those texts then create that meaningful context that we can then springboard from, in order to develop language. It's really hard to develop syntax or vocabulary when you're in a vacuum. I think allowing us to really get into a topic, or get into a story, gives us that space. And for multilingual learners, as well, it gives them that meaningful space to keep coming back to and to compare with their first or second language as well.

[00:23:10] Susan Lambert: Yeah, and I think about this idea of oral language. I love her question, because sometimes we think oral language development, oh, that's really important for kids before they learn how to read, like, before they come to school and early in kindergarten and first grade as they're just starting to learn how to read. The thing is I know I use oral language if I'm trying to work out ideas. If I'm trying to write something I will often call somebody and talk to somebody or say, "You know, I've got these thoughts in my head, can you help me think through?" And a lot of times that is through discourse, right? And so, at least here in the United States with our standards, right, there's a reason that we have reading standards, writing standards, speaking and listening standards. I really think all of those are important to really strong literacy development.

[00:23:56] Nathaniel Swain: Mm. And I think if you skillfully do this, and actually use that classroom talk as a way to develop that oral language, especially when you have that meaningful context you're talking about, then classroom talk isn't just like a tick box. Yes, everyone did a speech. Fantastic. We've done a great presentation. So, therefore, we've met the oral language requirements. Actually, every time you do a checking for understanding question, students could be practicing full-sentence answers. This is an engagement norm that I recommend to all teachers in that you're actually trying to model the kind of language you're looking to be seeing written down, but they're able to use it then and there through every question that they answer with their partner, or to the rest of the group. As well as those kinds of sentences, you might get 'em to craft and write down on their mini whiteboards, say if you're getting lots of those opportunities to respond in your lessons, then students are basically embedding that language. They're practicing it. They're rehearsing it with their partner. They're getting feedback on it from the rest of the group. They're writing it down, they're drafting it, they're redrafting it, which is why I really like, you know, cycles. Like Doug Lemov in "Reading Reconsidered," he talks in those middle school years, especially, about those read, write, discuss, sort of, cycles. Where you read some text, you discuss it as a group, and then through that process you write it, and maybe rewrite what you've done as well, and redraft based on those rich discussions. So, I think, as you go, these forms of communication come closer together. Because one enriches the other, and so on and so forth. But, uh, in the early stages, obviously we need to ensure that oral language is developing, especially if the decoding is not yet there. So, depending on the age of your students, and the other things that have got going for them, essentially, more language is always better. So, less sort of, you know, silent work where they might have to figure everything out for themselves and more sort of back and forth between short bursts of reading initially, to then unpacking and discussing the text, and then writing responses or preparing responses orally would allow that mix of talk to really support students at that important stage.

[00:25:47] Susan Lambert: Yeah, and just a little fun fact here, and a little preview for our listeners, is we are getting ready to do a miniseries that's supporting adolescent learners. And we're doing a lot of talking about how to grab some of these strategies and use them across content areas, right. Because the rigor of the academic language keeps getting more and more and more. And in order to develop that language, right, like discussing and talking about it is just a perfect way to help adolescents and multilingual learners, so.

[00:26:14] Nathaniel Swain: Mm-hmm. And those, um, little discussion frames just to enrich the discussion so you can teach those starting points to, um, contributing to a discussion. So, I agree with Susan's point because, or I have a different idea to Susan in that ...

[00:26:29] Susan Lambert: Oh yeah, yeah.

[00:26:29] Nathaniel Swain: You know, those little sentence stems, um, can be really helpful just to increase the rigor, so that students know that we're not just sharing the first idea that pops into our head, we're actually then listening to all the other ideas that come through in that classroom discourse. So, it's a dynamic interchange rather than just, you know, work on something and then spit it back out again. So, those are the kinds of tools can really help to lift up the rigor of the classroom, and that really complements the work that you're doing in the actual literacy, written space. The classroom talk becomes about the literacy, but much further as well.

[00:27:01] Susan Lambert: Yeah. You know what? That, I know, this is one more thing I have to say though. It reminds me of what we were talking about with reading is focusing on attention, or the purpose, and how important it is to focus that attention. The same thing with what you just said about sentence stems and discussions is really focusing that and how important that is. Wow, amazing!

[00:27:20] Nathaniel Swain: Yeah. Good.

[00:27:21] Susan Lambert: OK. Let's go to Elma from Minnesota. She helps districts and school leaders. And she wrote, what are the relationships between comprehension and memorization? Oh man! That seems like two very different things. What do you think about that?

[00:27:38] Nathaniel Swain: Well, memorization is an interesting one, because it has this negative connotation of rote memorization where something's being ...

[00:27:44] Susan Lambert: That's right, yeah.

[00:27:45] Nathaniel Swain: Yeah, memorize, but it hasn't necessarily been meaningfully memorized. Now, I've been reading this amazing book called Meaningful Learning Theory, and it's looking at Ausubel's Assimilation Theory, and it's by Sarah Cottinghatt in the UK. And what's great about this is that she makes the argument that to actually learn something, it can't be truly meaningless. Because it has to connect to something in order to be remembered. But you can have things that are more rote-like, in that you have an arbitrary, sort of, sequence, or you've got just a saying in your head that you're trying to say back and forth. Or, you know, a mnemonic that doesn't really relate. So, ideally, we're not just memorizing things that don't have those rich connections that are more rote-like. But, essentially, if you are wanting students to be good at comprehension, they also have to know stuff. And to know something, it has to be in your long-term memory, as we know from the Simple Model of Memory, or what's sometimes called the Information Processing Model, you can't just grab ideas from the ether. Many of the things that we bring to the text actually already exist in our schemas or schemata, if you wanna be fancy with your plurals there. So I don't think we should see memorization or comprehension as the enemy, but maybe what Elma's getting at there is that there's some students who don't always read really closely, because maybe they already know a lot about the text. Maybe they're not, um, integrating that knowledge well enough. That's maybe what it could be about. Or there could be some lines of work that teachers are working on where they feel like their job as teachers of comprehension is to get them to just remember lots of stuff, and maybe not in a meaningful way given she's used the word memorization. But either way, memory isn't a bad thing. Memory is actually where we store all of our learning. So, we'll get that misconception, sort of, handled. And knowledge plays a huge part in comprehension. As you've featured in many episodes on the show over the years, that when students have rich knowledge, and knowledge is very connected to vocabulary and language as we know, when they know stuff about the world of the text, then they do bring a lot more compensatory effects for any comprehension challenges they're having. They can fill in the gaps of those inferences that are being left there for the reader to make by the writer. And we should try and ensure that students do remember what they read, because then they can use that knowledge to enrich every other reading experience they have next.

[00:29:57] Susan Lambert: Yeah. It reminds me of what you were talking about in constructing this mental model, right? Part of in the reading comprehension process, while we are reading, we are often extracting information from our long-term memory. Sometimes it's background knowledge, prior knowledge, whatever it is, pulling that forward, making new connections, and maybe learning more about that particular thing we're thinking about or reading about. We're building a different kind of schema or different kind of mental model. And as a result of reading that text, we put something back in our long-term memory. Hopefully that's something different than what we pulled out of it. Right? And so, memory and memorization are tricky words when we're thinking about what does this look like in classroom instruction? And how do we want our students to, sort of, engage with the work? But, I do love that reminder that comprehension relies on building knowledge. And often we pull that knowledge out from, or the vocabulary, whatever it is, we pull that out from our long-term memory.

[00:31:02] Nathaniel Swain: And I guess, just a reminder there is that if you ever feel like your comprehension work only allows students to produce or perform something on a particular day in which you've just read that text, then you may be missing the opportunity to weave meaningful text together. So, even if they are just paragraphs that you're working from, ideally there's a thread that you can use to connect those texts over time, which is where a content-rich, knowledge-rich, or literature-rich approach would allow you to, sort of, have bang for your buck, so to speak, is the phrase from an earlier question. So, you developing those comprehension strategies, because you're reading and you're going through that comprehension process, but actually each lesson or each unit of work that you do actually connects knowledge or content over time so that students are remembering things that they have read. And then, as you said, the more that they read, the more that they know, and the easier they find the next reading, which is that beautiful virtuous cycle we can get to.

[00:31:57] Susan Lambert: Yeah, and not to go in the weeds again, but this also reminds me about vocabulary. We were talking about don't teach vocabulary in isolation. You know, like attach it to the context and the content. And why that's important is because vocabulary, much like what we know about a content area, we actually gain experience with over time. So, you can learn vocabulary very deeply so that you can use it very flexibly and all that could be considered memorizing a meaning of a word or memorization, when actually it's not. It's then developing more and more knowledge about that word.

[00:32:33] Nathaniel Swain: And Isabel Beck, who's also, um, one of the authors that's put together the "Bringing Words to Life" book that many people may have heard with the tiers of vocabulary, tier one, tier two, tier three. They make the argument that it's about meaningful encounters with those words. So, it's not just remembering it for, you know, a rote definition or a rote example and trying to reproduce that in a few days time. It's actually about, you know, that word seems to keep popping up. Like, I need to probably learn that, or, Ooh, that's a word that's now popped into my head as I'm writing because I've seen it so many times, or I've used it in my oral language. So, if you do your job well, the kinds of words that you want to teach should just be obvious from the text that you're choosing. And the texts inform those decisions you make. And then you can still teach them just as explicitly as you want to. But the cool thing about having found them already within a meaningful text is that when you teach it, it's kind of easy 'cause you say, "Oh, remember this moment in the Roald Dahl book "Matilda," where she was ecstatic and so excited because she had the chance to go to Miss Honey's house" or something like that. And suddenly ecstatic. They can remember the moment. They can even picture the face of the character when they're in that moment. So ecstatic is not a hard thing for them to hold on to. So the meaningful context creates a reason for them to understand it, and also to hold on to it. And then they may be able to keep using that in their oral language, if you weave it in, many, many times. I love a vocabulary wall, for example. Half of the time it's for the kids, but half of the time it's actually for the teacher. I used to do this thing in the afternoons when, you know, I taught kindergarten, and they were just exhausted in the final session. The day, it's like, what are we gonna do this session for? They've just come in, they're all ratty from running around in the yard, and what are we gonna do? But what we used to do is I'd have my vocabulary wall there of all the 10 or 15 words we've done over the last three weeks, and I'd look at it and go, "OK, someone give me a setting. Someone give me a character." And they did, 'cause we learn about the elements of a narrative. And then I put on some background music. I had a keyboard and I used to just, sort of, tinker on the keyboard a little bit. And then I just create a little story. And what I would do is I'd just bring in those words from the wall. Like, "and the character was ecstatic. The little bunny ran over the hill ecstatically because," and I just kept using all those same words in the little story that I created. And the kids loved it. You know, keep drip feeding all of that great vocabulary so that they don't have a reason to forget it. And you'll be amazed. The kids, especially in the early years, their brains are so spongy that if you just give them enough exposure and enough reason to use it, that word will just pop in their writing. It'll pop up in conversation a few weeks later.

[00:34:59] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Yeah. You hear 'em using it then on the playground, didn't you?

[00:35:02] Nathaniel Swain: So cool. Exactly. Yeah. All kinds of words that used to come up. The, you know, the word "cycle" kept coming up in all these different things that we looked at 'cause the cycle of the seasons, then the life cycle of a plant. And every time that came up, they used the gesture that we used to learn that word. So they were spinning around and saying, "Oh, there's another cycle." Like, there's so many things like a cycle. And we linked it to "bicycle," and all that sort of thing.

[00:35:23] Susan Lambert: Oh, words are so fun.

[00:35:24] Nathaniel Swain: Mm.

[00:35:24] Susan Lambert: Alright. Let's hear from Chelsea, who is a teacher in Washington. She wrote, "How do you help shift the mindset of understanding comprehension with your teaching colleagues? My fourth grade teammates continue to view comprehension by each skill. I specifically would like tips in encouraging them to let go of what you know and be OK with redefining your understanding. For reference, I share snippets of your podcast and have shown them MOCCA, which is an assessment, etc. I think the frustration is, as we know, comprehension is so abstract and difficult to measure, so I cannot present a comprehension or easy alternative process to use." Um, a quick reminder, MOCCA is just an assessment that we heard about from one of our guests from the University of Oregon, Gina Biancarosa, about the different ways that people comprehend. So it's the different profiles of comprehension. So, anyway, how do we help teachers or our colleagues understand this? And specifically that comprehension is difficult to measure. I think that's an important concept here too.

[00:36:31] Nathaniel Swain: Look, um, I think comprehension is difficult to measure because language is difficult to measure. When I used to do oral language assessments as a speechy or as we call it in Australia for sure, so speech language pathologist, essentially you have to do about 10 different assessments to get a sense of the oral language skills of the students. There's things around vocabulary. There's assessments that look at reception or understanding of spoken grammar. There's things that look at story level, language skills, or conversation. There's observation, checklists, and so on. And so, there isn't one score, or there isn't one set of things you can just tick off, for oral language. and for reading comprehension it's the same. So, it depends in what context, what kinds of topics, what kinds of stories, what kinds of conversational context is that student got rich-language experiences in. Is there difficulty, an underlying grammar problem? Is it an underlying vocabulary problem? Is it a lack of exposure? Like, you know, there's just so much going on. With reading comprehension there's more. 'Cause, you know, is it because they're actually just trying so hard to get the words right, that the comprehension doesn't come together? Is it because of that lack of fluency or expression? Is it because they're having trouble with some of those text conventions, about knowing that different texts are structured differently and that we have to read for different purposes? So it's not easy. And it's hard to change that view. Because in, say, a balanced literacy view where you just have your five or six or seven comprehension strategies you just work through them and cycle through them maybe three or four weeks on each one. Depending on how things were programmed. And so what that meant though is that you were just foreshadowing or front loading the strategy sometimes at the expense of the text choices. And the classic thing was teachers would go around and say, "Who can give me a text on summarizing something that shows summarizing really well?" And it doesn't matter what the topic is, doesn't matter how complex the content is, it was all about the strategy and the way to flip it. I think to address Chelsea's question is to say what we're trying to do is create meaningful text experiences. And the strategies are background. The strategies are the powerhouse behind the work we're doing, but the star of the show is the language and the text. And, if we can bring that to the attention of teachers and say, "Look, what we're trying to do here is build mental models. We're building representations of the text and we're helping ask questions and build habits that allow students to do that better." It really does flip the idea around. Then if you change your attention and say, "Well, how can I teach vocabulary to complement what we're doing with this text? Or how can I model some of these syntactical or sentence structure ideas in their writing, so that they can write similar sentences to what they're then reading?" I think you then start to see that comprehension is the combination of all of these capacities coming together. And hopefully it comes together really nicely, but sometimes it doesn't. I would say that really try and refocus what you're doing to say, "Well, how do I create meaningful text experiences in order to develop students' language and their knowledge?" Because those are things that I can continually improve, as well as their ability to then follow those metacognitive processes by engaging in those rich text experiences. So, it all comes back to shared reading, reading aloud, and giving students those short bursts of independence to practice those things by themselves until they can do it all independently, ideally.

[00:39:37] Susan Lambert: Yeah. And it reminds me of, you know, first of all, how big comprehension is.

[00:39:41] Nathaniel Swain: It's huge.

[00:39:42] Susan Lambert: And comprehension, like you said, isn't just one thing. If we think about Scarborough's Reading Rope, right? You think about all the elements woven together to create strong comprehenders. Then there's just no way that you can give one assessment that actually helps you understand what all it is or where comprehension is breaking down. The other thing it reminds me of is if I read a text, and if you read a text, Nate, and let's just say it's a text that we're both comfortable with, so we're gonna put ourselves on equal ground, we're gonna read a text, maybe a research study about something in early literacy. So, we both have background there, we both have knowledge there. My comprehension is going to be different than your comprehension. Because it's such a personalized process too, isn't it?

[00:40:27] Nathaniel Swain: It is, and it's it humans are geared whenever they're encountering language or knowledge, is to try and make meaningful connections. And so depending on what they're already thinking about, or what they already know, they're actually gonna come to that text at a very different starting point. It's through those rich discussions though, it's when you start to hear other people's perspectives and you, sort of, share those ideas. What we actually benefit from is that collective schema that we're building. Like, oh, we're enriching our understanding about the world of this text or about the topic that this text is talking about. So, even though we might start at different starting points, we can actually go on that journey together with text. I think that's really a different frame of mind. It's not just ticking off strategies, even though the strategy should be there and should be modeled and embedded. And you should use that meta language. I'm gonna make a prediction now. Oh, I wonder if we can synthesize this together? Or who can help me go back and reread? 'Cause I don't think we're really getting to the bottom of this, so still use that language, but don't feel like your job is to just power through a list of strategies, because that then puts the main game, which is building understanding of the text, into the background rather than front and center where it should be.

[00:41:33] Susan Lambert: Yeah. Love that. Alright, well that's all the questions we have time for today. So thanks to everyone who submitted those questions. Um, I wish we had time to actually dig into each one of them, but they're all, like, so deep. The more you talk about 'em, the more you understand that there's lots there. Before we go, Nate, I wonder if there's anything you wanna say, any big picture takeaways or wonderings from these questions? Any thoughts that you wanna leave our listeners with?

[00:41:59] Nathaniel Swain: I think, um, I love having these conversations with teachers and continuing to enrich our understandings about understanding texts. I think it's not easy work though, because in some ways we have have been taught to simplify this process in order to make it somewhat neater or simpler in order to work through with the ways to teach it, or easier to choose the text that we might choose. But here, I think there's an opportunity to move the whole profession forward, in thinking that our role is really about having rich text experiences that DO enrich the lives of our students. And I think if you keep that front and center in your work, and know that I'm building language, I'm building knowledge, I'm building vocabulary, I'm allowing students to be more strategic and think differently and critically about the text that they're reading, then it does become like a constantly moving target, but a very, very enjoyable journey. And I think we can all go on that together.

[00:42:52] Susan Lambert: I love that! And it just reminded me of, take your questions to your grade-level team or to your colleagues. And pose them to your colleagues and start your own professional learning community right there, closest to the kids that you're trying to influence. Well, Dr. Swain, it's always a pleasure to chat with you. Thank you so much for joining us again on this very special mailbag episode. We appreciate your wisdom.

[00:43:19] Nathaniel Swain: Thank you, it's always a pleasure. And love hearing your wonderful questions from your listeners.

[00:43:26] Susan Lambert: That was Dr. Nathaniel Swain. He is a teacher, instructional coach, and writer. He produces a blog for teachers called Dr. Swain's Cognitorium, and is co-host of the Chalk Dust podcast with Rebecca Birch. He works directly with schools and systems and through an online learning platform called Luminary. Thanks again listeners for joining me during this Season 10 deep dive into comprehension. All 14 episodes from this season are available right in the podcast feed. If you haven't checked them out yet, we've got a bundle of comprehension resources available at at.amplify.com/comprehension101. There's also a link in the show notes. Remember, you can always submit your literacy questions at amplify.com/sormailbag. We'd love to hear your questions about adolescent literacy and MTSS, two topics we'll be covering on upcoming episodes. And, as always, we'd love to hear how the science of reading is helping students in your community. Again, that's amplify.com/sormailbag, we'll be back in two weeks with a new episode that delves into the surprising history of dyslexia research.

[00:44:48] Teresa May: She did it at a time where there wasn't any technology, right? She's following these kids by writing letters or going to see them. And what emerged from her study essentially was an awareness that no matter what kind of learner you are, you can learn and you can move forward.

[00:45:06] Susan Lambert: That's next time on Science of Reading: The Podcast brought to you by Amplify. I'm Susan Lambert. Thanks so much for listening.