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Why background knowledge about the world can increase reading comprehension – even for facts you can just Google (with 2021 research update and free resources to boost your child’s background knowledge)

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It seems obvious but I’ll state it anyway: we read things to understand them. If students can’t understand what they’re reading at school, they will struggle to cope with the curriculum.

Reading comprehension is complex, but, according to the Simple View of Reading, it is the product of two proximal variables: word recognition and language comprehension skills.  

To understand what we read, we need lots of skills, including: 

What do we mean by “background knowledge”?

Background knowledge is all the world knowledge a reader brings to the task of reading a text (Smith et al., 2021). It includes events, facts, procedural knowledge (how to do things), as well as related vocabulary (Kintsch, 1998). Some researchers call it “prior knowledge”. Background knowledge about specific or defined fields, like engineering, medicine, or law, is often referred to as “domain knowledge” (Alexander & Jetton, 2000).   

Let’s use an example to illustrate how background knowledge may affect reading comprehension. Consider this excerpt from a Wikipedia article on American Football strategies (a topic I know very little about):

“Despite the multi-receiver sets, the spread option is a run-first scheme that requires a quarterback that is comfortable carrying the ball, a mobile offensive line that can effectively pull and trap, and receivers that can hold their blocks. Its essence is misdirection.”

What’s my background knowledge here? (This will be embarrassing!)

I know American Football is a popular team sport in the US, and I know some Australians play it, too. I know about quarterbacks, and Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from watching the news. I know how the field is laid out in a grid – hence the term gridiron. In the 1980s, I watched some terrible TV movies that involved American football. I’m aware of the annual hoopla about the cost of Super Bowls ads. I watched a Super Bowl with some American friends on TV when I worked for a US Investment bank, although I had no idea what was going on. I know about scoring touchdowns. A high school friend used to play an American football game on his PC, so I know about setting for offensive and defensive plays. Way back in 1997, I even watched part of a high school football game in Rochester, Minnesota, although all I remember is lots of waiting around and my hosts being very focused on statistics. 

What else do I know that might help me to understand the excerpt? I know about “misdirection” from my failed attempts to be a magician at around 10 years of age. I know the ordinary meaning of each word in this excerpt. 

What don’t I know? I have no idea what some of the technical terms mean in context (e.g. “run-first”, “pull and trap”). Nor do I know exactly what the words mean together because of my ignorance of how plays in the game are determined. I can get a rough idea – the gist – of the passage by drawing on my knowledge of other football codes, such as Rugby League and Aussie Rules. But the truth is, I lack the background knowledge to understand the simple-to-read passage fully. 

In a comprehension test, I would do fine with questions that required me to look back and find answers. I would have more difficulty with questions that required me to understand unstated details or to draw inferences about football. My comprehension of the passage would certainly lag that of a regular American football viewer. And I had to work much harder to access and recall things than would someone who has watched games recently.

Reading research shows that background knowledge about a topic may assist the reading comprehension of older school-aged children and adults when reading about the same topic. Recent research suggests that higher levels of background knowledge on a topic may, to a degree, also boost young school-aged children’s reading comprehension of a text on the same topic – although background knowledge levels appear to affect stronger and weaker readers differently (Smith et al., 2021 – see below).

So background knowledge may help improve reading comprehension. But we must take care not to overstate its effects for two main reasons:

Caveat 1: background knowledge is just one sub-component of one element of the updated Simple View of Reading

The cognitive foundations framework, developed by Hoover & Tunmer based on the Simple View of Reading, recognises that background information and inferencing skills are sub-components of language comprehension. However, both the Simple View of Reading and the cognitive foundations framework model state that:

Reading comprehension = word recognition x language comprehension.

The models predict that, if word recognition is very poor, then reading comprehension will also be poor regardless of background knowledge because:

  • multiplying anything by zero equals zero; and
  • if a reader cannot decode the text they are reading, they will not know what they are reading about, which will prevent them from using language skills or their background knowledge to compensate.

Background knowledge may also not be sufficient to compensate for poor oral language skills – especially if the reader cannot understand the words used in the text (language content), process the grammar used in the text (language form), or understand the conventions of type of text they are reading (language use), or simply not understand the questions they are being asked to probe their comprehension (e.g. questions containing academic words).

Caveat 2: Students struggle with reading comprehension for lots of reasons

Limited background knowledge about a topic may affect comprehension. But it’s important to remember that multiple factors – alone or in combination – explain why many students struggle with reading comprehension, including:

Astute readers will note that these caveats say the same thing in two ways: don’t overestimate the effect of background knowledge on reading comprehension, especially while students are learning foundational word recognition and language skills.

So what does the research evidence say? 

To most people, it seems obvious that people will understand what they read better if they already know lots about the topic of the text. But things are more complicated – especially when you consider some of the technical research about Cognitive Load Theory, and primary and secondary knowledge. 

For older students, we know that:

  • struggling readers tend to have less developed content knowledge and greater difficulties using knowledge to build mental models of what they read (e.g. Bransford et al., 1981; Oakhill, 1983);
  • readers with more knowledge on a topic outperform others with the same reading skills but less knowledge of the topic on reading-comprehension tasks (e.g. Recht & Leslie, 1989);
  • having some knowledge of a topic in a passage is positively associated with correctly answering questions about the passage (Compton et al., 2013);
  • struggling readers with poor background knowledge have difficulty recalling a passage’s main ideas, but when given background knowledge can often do so (Miller & Keenan, 2009); and
  • without well-connected knowledge, students have difficulty making inferences (e.g. Kendeou & van der Broek, 2005; McNamara & Magliano, 2009). (Knowledge about the world helps us to make inferences about what we are reading: to connect new information in the text with information about the topic that we have already stored in our long term memories.) 

In a recent critical review of peer-reviewed studies, Smith and colleagues looked at the effects of background knowledge on the reading comprehension of middle-to-late primary school-aged students (Smith et al., 2021). The underlying evidence base is really messy, in part because of different definitions, assessment tasks, and outcome measures used in different studies. But the researchers found that, in general:

  • higher levels of background knowledge enable primary school children to better understand a text; 
  • as you would expect, students with strong knowledge of a topic are better able to comprehend a text about the topic than a similar text about a different topic that they don’t know as much about;
  • good background knowledge may compensate in part for low reading ability (and vice versa):
    • Low-skilled readers with strong knowledge can compensate to some extent for poor reading skills.
    • High-skilled readers with poor knowledge can compensate to some extent for poor knowledge with good reading skills;
  • the compensatory effects of background knowledge were less pronounced when children were asked to make inferences. In particular, low skill readers with good background knowledge were not able to compensate for their poor reading while inferencing. 
  • The effect of background knowledge on reading comprehension depended in part upon the text’s:
    • cohesion (aka microstructure): the visibility of the links between phrases and sentences, e.g. lots of details to compensate for lack of background knowledge; and 
    • coherence (aka macrostructure): the extent to which the text provides information and cues to help the reader make connections across different parts of the text with things like headings, and conjunctions to help link and contrast ideas.
  • As you would expect, readers with less knowledge were assisted by texts with high cohesion and coherence.  
  • Interestingly, readers with high knowledge generated a more complete situation model when the text had less cohesion – a “reverse cohesion effect” perhaps related to the theory that expert learners benefit from reduced guidance and support (in contrast to novices).
  • Low skill readers were more likely to rely on background knowledge instead of what was in the text (even if the text conflicted with background knowledge) than high skill readers who were better able to spot inconsistencies. 

How might background knowledge help reading comprehension?

Having a vast store of quickly available, previously acquired knowledge enables the mind to take in new information in less time and with less effort and to link it to existing knowledge (Hirsch, 2003). Background knowledge may:

  • speed up basic comprehension and leaves working memory free to make connections between new and previously learned information;
  • help readers to make sense of word combinations that have ambiguous meanings. Knowing, for example, that “I slipped off the bank and made a huge splash” is about falling off a riverbank, and not a saving and lending institution;
  • help with inferencing, e.g. making sense of: “The explorers huddled in their tent, 20 kilometres away from the South Pole”, is easier to understand if you know it’s very cold in Antarctica; and
  • help older students to understand metaphor, idiom, irony, sarcasm, and other higher level language uses, e.g. “Victory is sweet”, “Don’t count your chickens” or “Donald Trump absolutely loves CNN”.

Why is the discussion about the teaching of background knowledge so controversial?

It’s a mystery to me. Before I trained to become a speech pathologist, I thought that everyone believed that we should teach school-aged children lots of facts about the world in a methodical, logical, and systematic way.  

I was wrong. 

Some people think knowledge is overrated and that students can Google facts if and as they need them. Others think that children learn knowledge best by following their interests and natural curiosities, rather than learning facts from expert teachers in a sequenced, structured way. Yet others seem to think that parents should be responsible for building knowledge outside of school hours (which seems a little unreasonable, especially for many families with histories of communication issues and families from low socioeconomic backgrounds).

Some researchers think that young students – especially in the early years of school –  spend too little time reading non-fiction, information-based texts (e.g. Danilow et al., 2013; Palinscae & Duke, 2004). Other researchers think that some teachers focus too much, for too long, on comprehension strategies and generic skills like critical thinking, and not enough time imparting knowledge about the world (e.g. Catts & Kahmi, 2017). For example, we know that there are no additional benefits to reading comprehension performance after around fifteen hours of instruction in generic comprehension strategies (e.g. Elleman, 2017; and Stevens et al., 2019). 

Needless to say, not everyone agrees!

What we do know is that, as readers develop, they need more advanced reading strategies to cope with the curriculum, especially for specialised areas of the curriculum like history, science and maths, where domain knowledge (a subset of background knowledge) is very important (e.g. Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008 and 2012).

How can we improve a child’s background knowledge? Free resources and tips

Here are several suggestions and resources, many of which are completely free:

  • Read/listen to more information/non-fiction texts. This will help children learn words and concepts needed to understand the news, social media, and books aimed at the general public. (When younger, my kids were big fans of Horrible Histories, for example, which has given them (amongst other things) a surprisingly solid understanding of the history and major personalities of the Roman Empire and Kings and Queens of England.)
  • Read fiction that is set in real places or time periods, e.g. “The Hole in the Dike“ or books set during major world events like the World Wars.
  • Avoid jumping from topic to topic without considering knowledge development. Instead, pair narrative and expository text within a topic or theme. There are some great online resources you can use for this, e.g.:
  • Use various media, e.g. listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos or movies about a topic as well as reading about it (e.g. Kendeou et al., 2008). For example, use interactive online resources such as:
  • Use read-alouds in class until Year 8 (Chall et al., 1996).
  • Explicitly teach content-related vocabulary. Here’s a free tool to teach a child new words. Here’s another resource from the Florida Center for Reading Research.
  • Morphemic awareness training, which may be more useful in some areas (e.g. science) than others (e.g. history).
  • Semantic feature analysis (e.g. Bos & Anders, 1990), e.g. for a free template, see Reading Rockets.
  • Discussion about texts, which have been shown to increase comprehension (Gersten et al., 2001).
  • Close reading of texts with repeated readings of complex short texts (e.g. Fisher & Frey, 2014).
  • Using Frameworks or Schema to help kids to assimilate new information more quickly, e.g.:
    • Story structure maps, like this free one, have been shown to improve reading comprehension (Perfetti et al., 2005).
    • Graphic organisers for story mapping, expository texts and concept mapping (e.g. Gersten et al., 2001). See several free ones from the Florida Center for Reading Research.
    • Knowledge Organisers. I used these to summarise my notes at school and uni and love them! You can read more about knowledge organisers here.
  • Use sequencing, cause-effect relationships and related “signal words” to help students determine the structure of a text, for example, words like:
    • first, second, next, last, while, during, after, before, then, until, immediately and meanwhile, signal a time (or temporal) structure, like a procedure;
    • either/or, neither/nor, compared with, likewise, similarly, yet, differ, different and however, signal a compare/contrast relationship;
    • because, so, thus, therefore, if/then, for this reason, accordingly and as a result, signal a cause and effect relationship;
    • in order to, problem, solution, steps, may be due, solve, result and leads to, signal a problem and solution text; and
    • is like, by way of illustration, including, for instance and as [big] as a, signal a description.
  •  Get out and explore the real world together.

Some examples of full programs that integrate reading and knowledge content instruction

Clinical bottom line

To improve a child’s reading comprehension skills, foundation skills training based on the Simple View of Reading is essential. We go into what this entails in much more detail here. 

Systematic knowledge-building is not enough on its own to compensate for poor reading skills. But background knowledge can help students to learn new information more efficiently, including when reading, and to understand how the world works.  

In this article, we’ve highlighted a number of resources to help parents and teachers help children to increase their knowledge of the world around them. We hope they are helpful!

Principal sources:

  1. Elleman, A.M. & Compton, D.L. (2017). Beyond Comprehension Strategy Instruction: What’s Next? Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 48, 84-91.
  2. Hirsch, Jr., E.D. (2003). Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge – of Words and the World, American Educator, Spring, 10-46.
  3. Smith, R., Snow, P., Serry, T., and Hammond, L. (2021). The Role of Background Knowledge in Reading Comprehension: A Critical Review. Reading Psychology, 42(3), 214-220.

Related articles:

David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

“All models are wrong, but some are useful”: 11 reasons we use the Simple View of Reading to help people with reading difficulties

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Consider this magnificent paragraph:

Morse Code

Fascinating, right? But only if you know Morse Code.

Now, try this one:

Evenings the in grumpy bit a get can and, fasting intermittent with experimenting also am I. Myself of photo a including not am I why is which, Movember for moustache a growing currently I am. Kinnane David is name my, introduction of way by.

If you’re reading this blog, you can probably read every single word. But it takes a bit of work to make sense of the passage because of the language.

Now let’s reverse the paragraph above:

By way of introduction, my name is David Kinnane. I am currently growing a moustache for Movember, which is why I am not including a photo of myself. I am also experimenting with intermittent fasting, and can get a bit grumpy in the evenings.

This is easy stuff for any expert reader. Even many young school-aged children would understand what I’m talking about if I read them the passage aloud – although I might need to explain Movember to an international audience, and “intermittent” to many young folk.

Your experiences reading these three paragraphs illustrate The Simple View of Reading (SVR), originally proposed by Gough & Tunmer (1986). 

The SVR says: 

Reading comprehension = word recognition x language comprehension.

Our reading assessment and intervention practices are based on the SVR, and we’ve written about the model extensively, including here and here and here.

This year, the SVR has come under a bit of an attack by researchers who think the SVR is simplistic and outdated (e.g. Duke & Cartwright, 2021). These researchers would like teachers and others working in literacy to use a more complex model that includes additional variables, like executive functioning. 

We read the criticism when it was published and were unconvinced – especially in light of the 2021 paper by Dolean and colleagues, which we summarised here. We’ve now had the benefit of reading a formal response by Hoover and Tunmer, and are even more satisfied with our conclusions. 

Why we support and use the SVR

For 11 main reasons, the SVR remains a useful reading model for teachers, speech pathologists, and others working to help students with reading difficulties: 

  1. Weight and quality of evidence: The conclusions implied by the SVR have been supported by over 150 studies, involving a range of readers, including beginners, experts, children, adults, people with different social-economic statuses and reading languages (e.g. Hoover & Tunmer, 2020; Dolean et al., 2021).
  2. Easy to explain and understand: The SVR is easy to explain to families, students and other clients with reading difficulties. We’ve even made a short video about it to spread the word: What I think about when I meet a child who can’t read.
  3. Focused on testable capacities (not invisible processes):
    • Capacities are about abilities – what you can do – like the ability to recognise printed words and to understand their meaning. These are things you can observe and assess when working with a real life student. 
    • Processes are cognitive operations underpinning reading, including things like the mechanisms for converting light patterns that reach the eye from a page of print into a sequence of letter patterns, then translating them into phonological representations, and then into links to the brain’s knowledge of words. These processes are important and interesting – I love reading about them. But, in a school or clinic, you can’t easily see or measure isolated cognitive processes.
  4. Focus on proximal causes: The SVR focuses on the two main proximal capacities that underlie reading success – the variables of closest origin that we know directly affect reading comprehension. 
  5. Clarity: The SVR implies that:
    • both word recognition and language comprehension are necessary for reading; and
    • neither skill is on its own sufficient to create good reading comprehension; and
    • you can’t compensate for poor decoding with good oral language skills, or vice versa. (A limitation in either or both skills will necessarily constrain reading compensation, i.e. multiplying anything by zero gives you zero.)
  6. Helpful for assessment planning and interpretation: The SVR implies that there are three main kinds of reading difficulties: 
    • an inability to recognise words quickly, e.g. because of limited decoding skills;
    • an inability to comprehend language, e.g. because of vocabulary deficits and/or knowledge limited language structures; or 
    • both.

This reminds  us to test both word recognition and oral language skills and to look for patterns of deficits. We have written more about this here and more about the differences and overlaps between Developmental Language Disorder and Dyslexia here. 

  1. Helpful for teaching: The SVR helps education and health professionals working with people with reading difficulties to identify and focus on the most important things at the time for the development of each student’s reading comprehension skills, recognising that: 
    • when decoding skills are very poor, they act as a bottleneck on reading comprehension; and
    • when decoding skills are stronger, language comprehension becomes a more important influence on reading comprehension.
  2. Parsimony: When the evidence for a complicated interpretation is weak or lacking, the simplest interpretation should be preferred. Occam’s Razor tells us that, in explaining a thing, no more assumptions should be made than are necessary. Recent evidence shows that a reader’s combined abilities to understand a language and to quickly and accurately identify its printed words accounts almost completely for the ability to read in the language (e.g. Dolean et al., 2021). We shouldn’t introduce more variables into the mix unless inclusion would explain things that the SVR cannot explain. This is not (yet) the case.  
  3. Opportunity costs: We have limited time and resources to work with children with reading difficulties. We need to spend that precious time working on things that we know improve reading comprehension outcomes, rather than things that might, or might sometimes.
  4. Specificity: If you want to get better at reading, you should work directly on reading-specific skills, and not on general processes thought to underpin them. For example, to date, there is insufficient evidence that working memory training transfers to improvements in language or reading comprehension; or that executive functions training is more efficient in improving reading comprehension than intervention designed to improve word recognition and/or to support language comprehension.  
  5. Resisting shiny new object syndrome (or progress for progress’ sake): Will Durant, the famous historian, warned us to avoid what he called the “fetish of novelty”, noting that people tend to exaggerate the value of new ideas and things. Discarding a tried and tested mental model like the SVR simply because it’s been around a while doesn’t make sense. In fact, it runs counter to the Lindy effect: the theory that the future life expectancy of an idea is proportional to its current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.

When the facts change…

None of this suggests that we will always support the SVR. If the facts change, e.g. because of significant, compelling, high quality, independent, new peer reviewed research showing the SVR is incorrect or incomplete in a material way, we will change our mind and embrace an augmented SVR or new model that helps our clients maximise their reading comprehension gains.   

The SVR itself continues to evolve with new research. For example, the original SVR referred to decoding, rather than word recognition as one of the two main factors involved in determining reading comprehension. The SVR was updated to be neutral on how word recognition is achieved, e.g. indirectly through grapheme-phoneme correspondences, or more directly through orthographic mapping. (You can read more about the very complicated dual stream models of reading here.)

In the final analysis, the SVR is just a model to help us to help people with reading difficulties. Shane Parrish reminds us that the Map Is Not the Territory – models are not reality. As George Box is reported to have said:

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

The SVR might not be perfect. It will almost certainly be updated and improved as new research is published e.g., on important topics like motivation and engagement. It may even, one day, be discarded and replaced with a new model. But, for now, it’s far too useful to throw over for a more complicated, less tested, and less useful set of ideas. 

Principal sources: 

Related articles:

David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

Beginning readers’ brains are not the same as skilled readers’ brains, so stop teaching beginners to read like they are adult experts

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Unlike speech and oral language (talking and listening), reading is biologically unnatural. Most (not all) people learn to understand and to speak their first language without much fuss. But everyone – in every generation, from every culture, in any language – needs to learn to read. As a species, we’ve only been doing it for a bit over 5000 years.

For some people, learning to read happens easily. For others – including people with dyslexia and reading comprehension problems – learning to read can be a lifelong struggle.

Learning to read changes the brain

Brain plasticity – also called ‘neuroplasticity’ – is the ability of the brain to modify its connections or to rewire itself. Without brain plasticity, the brain would not be able to develop from infancy to adulthood, or recover from brain damage (Banks, 2016).

At birth, we are not wired to read – there is no specialised “reading centre” in the brain. Instead, researchers think that most of us are able to ‘recycle’ evolutionary older brain circuits with similar underlying functions – e.g. general visual processing – to recognise written word forms. This is called the ‘neuronal recycling hypothesis’ (e.g. Dehaene & Cohen, 2007).

Many reading scientists think that learning to read consists of creating mappings (associations) between:

  • visual representations (letters and written words); 
  • phonological representations (speech sounds); and
  • semantic representations (word meanings).

These three-sided mappings are the focus of the ‘triangle model of reading’ (e.g. Seidenberg, 2005). This model suggests that learning to read requires us to:

  • look at written words, sentences and texts; and
  • convert them into oral (spoken) language, so that we can understand them (e.g. Dehaene & Cohen, 2007).

This model is consistent with the evidence-based ‘Simple View of Reading’, which you can read more about here and here and here. 

Learning to read: the print-speech convergence

To learn to read, we have to learn to integrate (combine into a useful whole):

  • auditory information (speech and oral language comprehension); with 
  • visual language information (recognising words). 

Learning to read results in a brain network that brings together speech, language and print recognition: an overlap in activation during reading tasks. Some researchers call this the ‘print-speech convergence’: a brain signature of successful literacy acquisition (Rueckl et al., 2015). 

The development of print-speech convergence can be seen in emerging readers, but not in pre-readers of the same ages. This suggests that learning to read induces (influences or causes) speech-print convergence (Chyl et al., 2018).

The dual-stream model of reading

The brain’s organisation for reading is different for beginners and for skilled readers. The brain changes as beginners learn to read (e.g. Dehaene et al., 2015; and Pugh et al., 2001). To understand what this means in a bit more detail, we need to understand some very basic brain anatomy and a theory called the ‘dual-stream model of reading’ (Marks et al., 2019; and Pugh et al., 2001):

Source: Selket, 2007.

This diagram shows a (very simplified) outline of the human brain visual system. There are two main streams to know about that are relevant for reading: 

  • the dorsal stream or system, which is marked in green; and
  • the ventral stream or system, which is marked in purple. 

For developing readers, the dorsal (green) system predominates at first. This stream is associated with analytic processing for learning to integrate the:

  • orthographic (letters/spelling); 
  • phonological (speech sound); and 
  • lexical-semantic (word comprehension/meaning) 

features of printed words. This stream is most involved in the slow, effortful learning that’s needed to build the foundations for reading. We have summarised some of the key research about how best to teach early reading skills here.

As beginners become more skilled, the ventral (purple) system plays an increasingly important role in the processing of reading, facilitating fast, fluent word recognition that does not require effortful decoding. To explore this almost magical process in more detail, you need to learn more about specific dual pathway models of reading, e.g. the DRC model (Coltheart et al., 2001), the Triangle Model (Harm & Seidenberg, 2004) and the CDP+ model (Perry et al., 2010), which are beyond the scope of this article. It’s also useful to learn about the Self-Teaching Hypothesis (e.g. Share, 1995), which we touch on here.

Growing evidence

Evidence for these ideas continues to mount. For example, recent research by He and colleagues on child beginners (aged 9-12 years) and skilled adult readers of Chinese (aged 20-21 years), using a Chinese word-sound matching tasks in speech and print, showed that:

  • skilled adult readers demonstrated greater speech-print convergence than children who were beginning to read;
  • consistent with the dual-stream model of reading, coactivation in the dorsal stream predominated for children, whereas coactivation in the ventral stream predominated in adults; and
  • greater visual-model specialisation was observed with development. 

In other words, the researchers found clear evidence of developmental changes in readers’ print-speech networks during word-sound matching processes. (The study is cited as our primary source below, with a link to the full paper.) These findings are consistent broadly with studies using alphabetic languages (e.g. Chyl et al., 2018; Marks et al., 2019; and Preston et al., 2016).* 

Bottom line

When we are teaching children and adults how to read, we must remember that:

  • reading is biologically unnatural: no one is wired to do it from birth;
  • the brain needs to rewire itself to become good at reading; and 
  • rewiring the brain to read takes lots of time and effort, and comes more easily to some, than to others.

We can help beginners learn to read by:

Beginners are not experts. Beginning artists can’t paint like Leonardo da Vinci or Jackson Pollock. Beginner composers can’t write music like Johann Sebastian Bach, John Williams, or Prince. Beginning readers can’t read like Maria Popova, James Clear, Mortimer Adler, Octavia E Butler, Warren Buffett,  Mahatma Gandhi  – or even just you or me.

Related articles:

Principal source: 

Yin He, Xin Liu, Jiali Hu, Emily S. Nichols, Chunming Lu & Li Liu (2021). Difference Between Children and Adults in the Print-speech Coactivated Network, Scientific Studies of Reading, DOI: 10.1080/10888438.2021.1965607 https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2021.1965607

An introduction to neuroplasticity: What is brain plasticity and why is it so important?

*In studies of alphabetic languages, there were some differences from the findings in He et al., 2021, including significant co-activation of the dorsal posterior temporal regions of the brain in beginning child readers. The researchers speculate that this may be due to the differences between alphabetic and non-alphabetic writing systems.

David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

Stories help students to understand and remember new information. Here’s why.

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When I think about gravity, the first thing that pops into my head is an image of an apple falling off the tree and onto Isaac Newton’s head. For water displacement, it’s Archimedes leaping out of a bathtub and running home naked through the streets shouting “Eureka!”. When I hear Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, I imagine the almost completely deaf composer continuing to wave his arms furiously, well after the orchestra had finished playing. 

Many historians question whether these events occurred. It’s likely that they didn’t – at least not in the way I read about them at school. But stories like these helped me to learn about physics, maths, and music. And I still remember them decades on. 

If I go back to some of my earliest memories, I realise that I learned many life lessons being told (and later, reading) stories and fables about the importance of things like perseverance and patience, kindness, telling the truth, the importance of giving to others, flexibility and inventiveness under pressure, and avoiding greed.  These were stories I was keen to pass on to my own children as soon as they were old enough.

Even when I think about complex topics, like the causes of World War I, it’s again the stories that come first. An image of the doomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife sitting in that black car on the streets of Sarajevo is much easier to summon than more abstract thoughts about the complex interplay of European colonialism, nationalism, and the disruptions caused by industrial, scientific and political revolutions. This is both the advantage and drawback of stories: they are easier to remember, but can oversimplify events and ideas, and lead to bias when a good story trumps the truth.

Reading is one of the best ways we have to learn new information. True, we learn from non-fiction. But stories – also known as narratives – are more easily understood and recalled.  

Why?

Stories and essays differ in purpose and structure

Written narratives include short stories and novels. They are usually written to entertain readers, and follow a familiar structure, which is known as “story grammar”. Story grammar includes:

  • setting: the story’s time and place; 
  • plot: the things that happen in the story, which centre around the goals of the main character (also known as the “protagonist”) and which drive character actions and emotional responses. Most commonly, events progress through a chronological order of goal-centred events;
  • characters with conflicting goals: the goals of the different characters conflict, creating a tension that builds to a climax; and
  • resolution: in which the goals of the protagonist are either achieved or remain out of reach.

Many visual aids exist to help students to understand story grammar. Here’s the one we use: 

Essays, textbooks, non-fiction articles, and manuals are all examples of expository texts. “Expository” means “intended to describe or explain something”. Expository texts are written to inform readers, communicating information and ideas about a specific topic. They often contain descriptions, definitions, ideas, and explanations that are structured and supported by arguments. Their structure often looks like a pyramid, with the theme or topic introduced first (at the pyramid tip) and and the theme subsequently elaborated at length.

So why are stories easier to understand and to remember than essays?

We don’t know for sure. But there are a several good theories:

  • In their structure, stories resemble our everyday lives. In parallel with the structure of stories, most of us experience life in the “real word” as:
    • a series of events that happen for a reason in chronological order (see more about sequencing as an aid to comprehension here);
    • organised around personal goals; and
    • presenting us with a series of obstacles to achieving our goals, which we struggle with and either overcome or fail to achieve, resulting in emotional experiences.  
  • The content of stories maps closely to our everyday experiences. Even if set in space, or fantasy worlds, stories often focus on social relationships and the conflicts that inevitably result from conflicting goals. Most stories involve themes of familiar topics for most humans, including friendship, conflict, love, and separation, and we all have some experience with these topics. Most stories use the vocabulary of traits, conflict and emotions, which mirror how we communicate our own experiences.
  • Most of us are more familiar with the structure and at least some of the content of stories. As such, we have better prior knowledge of what to expect from a story. We can generate more knowledge-based inferences about stories, which aids our comprehension of them. For example, if we read a story about a boy who is rejected by his classmates and has to eat his lunch alone, most of us will infer from our own experiences of rejection that the boy feels hurt and lonely, without the author needing to spell it out for us. You can read more about inferencing here and here.
  • Many of the things we read in expository texts are new concepts: things that, by definition, we don’t know much about. We can’t rely as much on our general knowledge, and our understanding will depend on our knowledge of the specific topic or domain.
  • Stories are a prominent part of human history across cultures. Before reading and writing, oral storytelling was the primary mode of communication. It still is in many cultures. We use stories to retain and transmit information from generation to generation. Some scientists think that stories and storytelling gave our early ancestors an evolutionary advantage, including the ability to share survival-dependent information across generations, e.g. about poisonous plants, dangerous places, and predators. (You can read more about this type of “primary knowledge” here.)
  • We are exposed to stories from the very beginning – from early childhood, and sometimes from before we have the ability to speak. Stories are the most common type of text encountered during early schooling, with some students being introduced to expository texts as late as at the ages of 8-9 years. (As an aside, that’s one reason I recommend introducing and using more nonfiction books to preschoolers and younger students here.)
  • Stories may be easier to remember because they provoke emotions. As we read stories, we experience and mentally represent the emotional states of the characters. Emotional events are more deeply imprinted on the mind, and can create “flash-bulb” memories. 

New research confirms that stories are easier to understand and recall than essays

In 2021, Raymond A. Mar and colleagues published a meta-analysis of studies looking at memory and comprehension in stories versus expository texts. Most of the information in this article comes from this paper (see citation below).

Based on 75 studies and data from more than 33,000 participants, the researchers confirmed that stories were more easily understood and recalled than essays. In other words, they found that people have an easier time understanding and recalling information presented in a story compared to that presented in an essay.

Bottom line

When teaching students, we should think about the benefits of introducing new information in stories to exploit the narrative advantage. But:

  • we should recognise that narratives will not always be appropriate or efficient – particularly when the purpose of the text is to inform people who already have significant domain or subject matter knowledge on the topic. But storytelling techniques can still liven up a dry topic and make it easier for readers to understand. Using techniques common in mixed genres, like narrative journalism, for example, may give us the best of both worlds.
  • we must be wary of narrative fallacy, the tendency to make connections between things and to impose our imaginations on arrangements of data, and where we see patterns where none exist. This is especially important in science, where correlation does not always mean causation, and where we are all vulnerable to being misled by stories.

Main source: Mar, R.A., Li, J., Nguyen, A.T.P., & Ta, C.P. (2021). Memory and comprehension of narrative versus expository texts: A meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28: 732-749.

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David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

What are the priorities for early reading instruction: should we work on executive functions or focus on word decoding and oral language skills?

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The Simple View of Reading, originally proposed in 1986 by Gough and Tunmer, suggests that reading comprehension in early school years is best predicted by two factors:

  • the child’s fluent word decoding; and 
  • the child’s oral language skills. 

For example, studies have shown that fluent decoding and language skills, together with the effects of their interactions, explain more than 96% of the variance in students’ early reading comprehension development (e.g. Hjetland et al., 2018). You can read more about the Simple View of Reading here and here.

Some researchers think that a third factor has an important, additional, part to play in reading development: executive functions.

What does “executive functions” mean?

Executive functions are hard to define and even harder to measure. They are a set of top-down cognitive abilities that control thoughts and behaviours that include:

  • verbal working memory, e.g. the ability to recall chunks of word-related information, like lists of numbers or words in sequence;
  • visuospatial memory, e.g. the ability to mimic a sequence of movements, as in the famous “Simon” game of the 1980s; 
  • inhibition, e.g. the the ability to rapidly name opposite shapes (e.g. “say square when you see a circle”) or the opposite direction (e.g. “say down when the arrow is pointing up”); 
  • shifting or cognitive flexibility, e.g. tasks like saying the correct shape or arrow direction only if the object is coloured white, and the opposite shape or arrow direction if the item is black; 
  • planning, e.g. using strategies before, during, and after tasks to achieve a desired objective; and
  • selective and sustained attention, e.g. the ability to identify targets among distractors.

There are plausible reasons why each of these functions may play a role in improving reading comprehension.   

But do they?

Recent research, conducted with Romanian-speaking second graders, suggests that:

  • executive functions, as with decoding and language skills, have a strong association with reading comprehension; but
  • executive functions do not have a significant direct effect on the development of reading comprehension in early years beyond fluent decoding and oral language skills (at least in languages like Romanian, which have relatively transparent orthography); and
  • fluent decoding and oral language skills explained 92% of the variance in the students’ reading comprehension, providing further support for the Simple View of Reading.

In other words, executive functions did not predict reading comprehension skills beyond the effects of fluent decoding and language skills.

These results were consistent with those from an earlier US study conducted with children aged 9-14 years in the US (Spencer et al., 2019). Together, the results suggest that the Simple View of Reading does not need to be updated to include executive functions as a third factor.

Clinical bottom line: What does this research mean for early reading instruction?

If we want to improve students’ reading comprehension skills, we should prioritise teaching students word decoding skills – especially in the early stages of reading development – and oral language skills, rather than spending our scarce time and money working on discrete executive functions like working memory and cognitive flexibility. 

You can read a lot more about the science of reading, and what it means for early reading instruction here.

Principal Source:

Dolean, D.D., Lervåg, A., Visu-Petra, L., and Melby-Lervåg, M. (2021). Language skills, and not executive functions, predict the development of reading comprehension of early readers: evidence from an orthographically transparent language. Reading and Writing, 34, 1491–1512. Available here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11145-020-10107-4

Related articles:

David

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

Check out our therapy and provider resources Go to our shop