Research-Based Practices in Early Reading Series Pacific Resources for Education and Learning 2005 A Focus on Comprehension is the third in the Research- Based Practices in Early Reading Series published by the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) at Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL). Writers: Fran Lehr, MA Jean Osborn, MEd Dr. Elfrieda H. Hiebert, Visiting Research Professor, University of California, Berkeley The REL at PREL would like to express sincere thanks to the following reviewers: Dr. Michael Graves, University of Minnesota Dr. Margaret McKeown, University of Pittsburgh Dr. Judith Scott, University of California, Santa Cruz Cover photo by Mike Sing. Additional copies of A Focus on Comprehension may be downloaded and printed from www.prel.org/programs/rel/rel.asp. © PREL2005 This product was funded by the U.S. Department of Education (U.S. ED) under the Regional Educational Laboratory program, award number ED01CO0014. The content does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. ED or any other agency of the U.S. government. A Focus Comprehension on A major goal of reading comprehension instruction is to help students develop the knowledge, skills, and strategies they must possess to become proficient and independ- ent readers. However, although decades of research have revealed a great deal of information about how readers get meaning from what they read and about the kinds of explicit instruction and activities that are most successful in helping students to become good readers, recent class- room observation studies indicate that students in typical elementary school classrooms still receive little in the way of effective comprehension instruction (e.g., Pressley, Wharton-McDonald, Hampson, & Echevarria, 1998; RAND Reading Study Group, 2002). 3 Research-Based Practices in Early Reading How serious is the problem? Consider the following fig- ures: 1. On recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) measures, 37% of fourth grade stu- dents fall into the “below basic” category; 59% in the “below proficient” category (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004). 2. Among fourth graders, only 40% of white students, 17% of Native American students, 16% of Hispanic students, and 12% of African American students are proficient in reading (Donahue, Finnegan, Lutkus, Allen, & Campbell, 2001). 3. Among eighth grade students, those who are non- white or who are from low-income families read three to four grade levels lower than students who are white and those who are economically more advan- taged (Office of Vocational and Adult Education, 2002). 4. Amajority of incoming ninth grade students in high- poverty, urban schools read 2 to 3 years below grade level (Office of Vocational and Adult Education, 2002). 5. More than 8 million students in grades 4–12 are struggling readers. Each school day, some 3,000 stu- dents drop out of high school (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004). The purpose of this booklet is to examine what research tells us about factors that affect reading comprehension and about what instruction must contain and what it must do to help students become proficient comprehen- ders. We begin by discussing exactly what we mean by reading comprehension. 4 A Focus on Comprehension What Is Reading Comprehension? W idely cited definitions of reading comprehension generally have at their core some variation of con- structing meaning from text. Durkin (1993), for example, defines comprehension as “intentional thinking during which meaning is constructed through interactions between text and reader.” In the Literacy Dictionary, Harris and Hodges (1995, p. 39) define it as “the construction of the meaning of a written text through a reciprocal interchange of ideas between the reader and the message in a particular text.” These definitions have at their core the idea that meaning resides in the deliberate thinking processes readers engage in as they read. The meaning they get from their reading is influenced both by their relevant prior knowledge and experiences and by the kind of text they are reading and its content (National Reading Panel, 2000). Such defi- nitions, however, do not adequately capture the complexity of comprehension. How well a reader is able to construct meaning from a text is influenced by many factors, including the nature of the reading activity; the abilities and skills the reader brings to the activity; the nature of the text being read—its genre, its subject matter, and the density and quality of its writing; and the social and cultural factors that make up the context of the reading. In recent years, efforts to recognize the complexity of comprehen- sion have resulted in expanded definitions, such as the definition used by the RAND Reading Study Group, a group charged by the 5 Research-Based Practices in Early Reading U.S. Department of Education with developing a research agenda to address pressing issues in literacy. To guide its work, the RAND group defined comprehension as: “the process of simulta- neously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language. It consists of three ele- ments: the reader, the text, and the activity or purpose for reading” (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002, p. 11). According to this def- inition, the elements of reader, text, and activity are interrelated and are shaped by (and in turn shape) the larger social and cultural context in which the reading occurs. Other groups, including the NAEP(National Assessment Govern- ing Board, 2004) and the Program for International Student Assessment (Campbell, Kelly, Mullis, Martin, & Sainsbury, 2001), have developed similar definitions to reflect comprehension as a process that requires the coordination and interaction of multiple factors. The definition of reading comprehension used in this booklet reflects this view of comprehension as a multi-dimensional process that involves factors related to the reader, the text, and the activity. What Is Text? In this booklet, we use the term text to refer to any form of connected written language, including the language found in/on: • comic books • computer screens • directions/instructions • magazines • newspapers • novels • poems/rhymes • repair manuals • short stories • signs • textbooks 6 A Focus on Comprehension Factors Related to the Reader All readers bring to their reading differences in competencies, such as oral language ability, fluent word recognition, and knowl- edge of the world. They also bring an array of social and cultural influences, including home environment, community and cultural traditions, and socioeconomic status (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002; Rueda, 2004). Reader Competencies To understand the role that reader competencies play in compre- hension, it is helpful to view reading as a 2-level process. One level is made up of the application of foundational skills, such as word recognition and decoding, fluency, and vocabulary knowl- edge. The other level is made up of higher order reading process- es, or the procedures readers use to make connections among words—that is, how words work together in sentences, para- graphs, and passages—and to make connections between their existing knowledge and text information so as to analyze, evalu- ate, and think about the meaning of sentences, paragraphs, and entire texts (Pressley, 2000; RAND Reading Study Group, 2002). Proficient comprehension requires all these processes. Foundational Skills and Processes Word recognition and decoding. Good readers understand that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds (Adams, 1990; Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985; Bond & Dykstra, 1967; Chall, 1967). Because of this knowledge, good readers are able to read familiar words quickly, accurately, and automatically, and to “decode” unfamiliar words by identifying and blending the individual sounds represented by each word’s letters. Once good readers have identified a word, they use this knowledge to determine whether they know the word’s meaning—that is, whether it is in their oral language vocabulary and whether the word makes sense in its context. If it does, they move on with their reading; if it does not, they look closer at the word and think longer about its mean- ing (Adams, 1990). Clearly, word recognition and decoding are foundational reading skills, and must be core elements of any program of beginning reading instruction. These skills alone, however, do not lead auto- matically to effective comprehension. Good word recognition and decoding skills are necessary but not sufficient if we want students to be able to read and make sense of the many kinds of text they 7 Research-Based Practices in Early Reading will encounter in (and out of) school (Adams, 1990; RAND Reading Study Group, 2002; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Fluency. Defined by the National Reading Panel (2000, p. 3.5) as “the ability to read a text quickly, accurately, and with proper expression,” fluency appears to serve as a bridge between word recognition and reading comprehension.1It is because fluent readers are able to identify words accurately and automatically, that they can focus most of their attention on comprehension (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974). They can make connections among the ideas in the text and between the text and their background knowledge. In other words, fluent readers can recognize words and comprehend at the same time. Less fluent readers, however, must focus much of their attention on word recognition. Because they cannot identify words rapidly, they may read word-by-word, sometimes repeating words, sometimes misreading or skipping words. They may group words in ways that they would not do in natural speech, making their reading sound choppy (Dowhower, 1991). The result is that non-fluent read- ers have insufficient attention to devote to comprehension (see, e.g., Anderson et al., 1985; National Reading Panel, 2000). Vocabulary knowledge.The powerful relationship between com- prehension and vocabulary knowledge is one of the most consis- tent findings in reading research.2 Research shows both that good readers generally have large vocabularies (Anderson & Freebody, 1981; Nagy, Anderson, & Herman, 1987) and that improving stu- dents’vocabularies also can improve their reading comprehension (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982; McKeown, Beck, Omanson, & Pople, 1985). The relationship works this way: To get meaning from what they read, students need a great many words in their vocabularies as well as the ability to use various word-learning strategies to establish the meanings of words they do not know when they encounter them in print. Students who lack adequate vocabularies or effective word-learning strategies necessarily struggle to achieve comprehension. Higher Order Reading Processes Good readers bring to each reading activity a great deal of general world knowledge (Anderson & Pearson, 1984; Hirsch, 2003). As they read, good readers activate their network of existing knowl- 1For a more complete discussion of the role of fluency in reading comprehension, see the PRELbooklet Focus on Fluency, available online at www.prel.org. 2For a more complete discussion of the role of vocabulary in reading comprehension, see the PRELbooklet Focus on Vocabulary, available online at www.prel.org. 8 A Focus on Comprehension edge, or schema, as they encounter topics or words in a text that relate in some way to that network. Once activated, schemas trig- ger connections to other schemas, thus supporting comprehension. Logically, then, the larger a reader’s network of schemas the greater the likelihood that he or she will read with comprehension. In addition, good readers engage in metacognition as they read. Cognition refers to mental functions such as remembering, focus- ing attention, and processing information. Metacognition refers to readers’awareness of their cognition; that is, their thinking about their thinking. For example, before they read, good readers use their knowledge of the text subject to think about and set purposes and expectations for their reading. As they read, they think about whether they are understanding the text and, if not, what they can do to improve understanding. After reading, they may think about what they read, whether they enjoyed or learned something from it, and whether their reading gave them ideas of information they might use in the future (Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Paris, Lipson, & Wixson, 1983; Paris, Wasik, & Turner, 1991; Pressley, 2000). Social and Cultural Influences To a certain extent, reading is a cultural and social activity, as well as a cognitive one. As a result, reading differences among students often reflect the varying social and cultural environments in which students live and learn to read (Dickinson, 2004; Gee, 1990). This is so because children’s initial attitudes toward reading are acquired, quite naturally, through their experiences with their fam- ilies and though their social interactions in their cultural and lan- guage communities. These attitudes represent how families and cultural or language communities interpret the world and transmit information and how they view themselves as readers (Dickinson, 2004; Gee, 1990; Heath, 1992). Students’socioeconomic status (SES) also can play a role in their reading development. Students from low-income homes may have fewer early experiences with books and engage in fewer literacy- promoting activities than students from higher income homes (Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2001). In addition, they may have fewer opportunities to engage in the kinds of “academic,” or school- related oral language experiences that contribute to the vocabulary growth so essential to later reading comprehension (Hart & Risley, 1995; Kamil, 2004). Nonetheless, as Goldenberg (2001) notes, “Effective school and classroom programs will make a difference, despite SES.” 9 Research-Based Practices in Early Reading Recognizing Students’ Diverse Backgrounds Only when teachers understand the cultural backgrounds of their students can they avoid culture clash. In the meantime, the ways in which teachers comprehend and react to stu- dents’culture, language, and behaviors may create prob- lems. In too many schools, students are required to leave their family and cultural backgrounds at the schoolhouse door and live in a kind of “hybrid culture” composed of the community of fellow learners. (Latchat, 1998) Factors Related to the Text Comprehension comes from the representations of the ideas in a text that readers construct as they read (Alexander & Jetton, 2000). These representations are influenced by text features and are related to genre and structure, or the way in which content is organized (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002) and to language features, such as vocabulary and syntax (sentence structure and complexity) and the author’s writing style and clarity of expres- sion (Armbruster, 1984; Freebody & Anderson, 1983). Text Genre and Structure Text genre may be classified in many ways, such as fiction, non- fiction, fairy tales, fables, and plays. Text structure refers to famil- iar patterns that establish the interrelations among the ideas of a genre, such as cause-effect or time-order relationships in nonfic- tion; the division of plays into acts and scenes; the rhyme and rhythm of poems; dialogue in fiction—and so on. Research indi- cates that different text structures place different demands on read- ers’comprehension and that learning to identify and take advan- tage of text structure is a characteristic of proficient readers (Dickson, Simmons, & Kame‘enui, 1998). Although each genre has specific structural features that can be helpful to comprehension, research has focused most attention on the features of two types of writing found across genres. The two types of writing are narrative and informational. Learning from narrative writing and learning from informational writing often requires students to process what they read in different ways. 10 A Focus on Comprehension