Reading comprehension and knowledge and something else

I was finally reading Michael Goldstein's terrific blog when I came across this post:

E.D. Hirsch

If you teach English, or you're a school leader — and I'm particularly looking at you, friends in No Excuses charter schools, with our collective student gains in math that are 4x higher than those in English — I think a bare minimum threshold is that you can:

a. Explain E.D. Hirsch's arguments

b. Describe the degree to which your class/school adheres to or rejects his view

c. Justify why

I got turned onto re-reading Hirsch through Robert Pondiscio, who until recently worked for Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation as a blogger.

To the best of my knowledge, students at Morningside Academy make the same gains in reading they do in math: two years' progress in one year's time. That is the guarantee Morningside makes to parents. Their child will make two years' progress in one year's time or tuition is refunded.

More specifically, Morningside guarantees that each child will make two years' progress in one year's time in the child's most difficult subject. Since many of students there have diagnoses of dyslexia, presumably the worst subject is reading, often as not. Morningside's students are middle and upper-middle class, but Kent Johnson and his group have worked with disadvantaged populations, too. As far as I know, two-years-in-one applies to low-income students, too.

For (remedial) reading comprehension, Morningside uses Robert Dixon's Reading Success. Dixon's approach to teaching "main idea" is sui generis: his program teaches students to identify anaphora first. Dixon's definition of anaphora: "a pronoun or other words used to refer to some other word or name." (And here's a simple example of anaphora)

Morningside students become fluent at identifying anaphora and their referents in the text. As I recall, they then identify the main idea by counting the anaphora. The main idea has the most. (Still haven't read my Dixon handout...if I'm wrong about that, I'll correct.)

Once students have completed Dixon's curriculum, they continue to improve their reading within the subject areas.

We've talked about this before, so this is a repeat: the idea that you would teach reading comprehension by focusing very specifically on anaphora was a revelation to me. I've been teaching anaphora to my students ever since.

My experience at Morningside makes me skeptical of the claim that lack of background knowledge is the only meaningful explanation for the decline in reading comprehension in the U.S., or for the failure of the good charter schools to make much headway improving reading comprehension.

I was mulling this over, trying to think how one might separate background knowledge from some kind of 'textual knowledge' students also lack, when I remembered the fact that my students can have difficulty understanding fables.

One of my best students -- a bright, capable young woman -- did not understand this fable, which she had read out loud to the class:

A dispute arose between the North Wind and the Sun, each claiming that he was stronger than the other. At last they agreed to try their powers upon a traveller, to see which could soonest strip him of his cloak.

The North Wind had the first try; and, gathering up all his force for the attack, he came whirling furiously down upon the man, and caught up his cloak as though he would wrest it from him by one single effort: but the harder he blew, the more closely the man wrapped it round himself.

Then came the turn of the Sun. At first he beamed gently upon the traveller, who soon unclasped his cloak and walked on with it hanging loosely about his shoulders: then he shone forth in his full strength, and the man, before he had gone many steps, was glad to throw his cloak right off and complete his journey more lightly clad.

Moral: Persuasion is better than force.

When one of my students has trouble understanding a fable, the problem isn't background knowledge.

I'm not sure what the problem is, but the fact that Morningside Academy achieves such amazing results using a reading comprehension curriculum that teaches anaphora leads me to believe that, at a minimum, cohesion devices should be directly and explicitly taught in English class.

On that subject, here's Sally Hampton: The Importance of Writing Structures, Coherence, and Cohesion to Writing and Reading.

We need a Writing Renaissance, not a "Writing Renaissance"

Here is is! (Cross-posted from Out in Left Field.)

According to an article in this past week's Edweek, K12 writing instruction is undergoing a renaissance:

Teachers are focusing on writing instruction like never before. More and more, they're asking students to write about what they read, helping them think through and craft their work, and using such exercises as tools not only to build better writers, but to help students understand what they're studying.

This renaissance, the article claims, includes a shift towards explicit instruction:

The shift is still nascent, but people in the field are taking notice. It marks a departure from recent practice, which often includes little or no explicit writing instruction and only a modest amount of writing, typically in the form of stories, short summaries, or personal reflections, rather than essays or research projects on topics being studied.

In fact there appears to be little or no increase in explicit instruction, but simply a shift in quantity and genres. For example, rather than taking inspiration from Dr. Seuss to write their own whimsical stories:

First graders in South Strafford, Vt., are reading Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, for fun, then for greater understanding, and then to hunt for evidence. They look for events in the plot that illustrate how the whimsical protagonist tries to protect the Earth and assemble examples into a simple paragraph to support the theme of the story.

In keeping with the new Common Core standards for English and Language Arts, the article notes, "these kinds of projects are unusual for the way they connect writing and reading." But the ultimate goal seems not to be to improve writing, but reading:

"Now we're seeing a lot more attention to the idea that writing about a text can improve reading about that text," said literacy expert Timothy Shanahan, the chairman of the department of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The article cites a 2010 study:

a meta-analysis of 93 studies of writing interventions, which found that writing had consistently positive effects on students' reading skills and comprehension. Writing about what they read was particularly helpful to students' comprehension, but so were taking notes on what they read, answering questions about it, and simply writing more often.

In other words, despite the fact that ever since No Child Left Behind, as the article itself notes, concerns about reading comprehension have eclipsed concerns about writing, the ultimate goal of the "Writing Renaissance" continues to be reading.

Worse, this emphasis on writing for comprehension has become yet another excuse to water down math class:

A math teacher in Brighton, Mich., found that writing had a powerful effect on helping her 6th grade students understand algebra concepts. Julie Mallia and a colleague from the English department, Don Pawloski, teamed up in spring 2009 to have students write 10-page "how to" books for the next fall's 6th graders. Drawing both on math and on writing instruction, students had to explain concepts such as solving a problem with x.

What goals the article does mention that pertain specifically to writing are about quantity and argumentation rather than technique. Students should be writing more, and they should be writing pieces that shift from:

"opinion untethered to evidence" and "decontextualized" writing—writing not based on the reading of a text—in favor of writing that requires students to read, comprehend, and respond to text, grounding their interpretations in evidence found there.

As for writing strategies, we find nothing here about corrections and revisions. Instead of rewriting, there's rereading:

They read a text again and again, first to make sense of it and note their questions, as the teacher works the room to help,... A second round of annotating focuses on looking for elements of the genre and how it works. They read again to spot structural decisions the writer made to create meaning, she said. The students then use what they learned in their own writing.

There's something to be said for "spotting structural decisions" and trying to emulate these. Indeed, the one instance of direct writing instruction the article cite pertains to organization:

When Ms. Leddy teaches The Lorax, she walks through the text repeatedly with students, discussing it from a different angle each time. When they're through, students learn to write short "hand paragraphs," with the thumb as the topic sentence—the Lorax cares for the Earth—followed by three examples of how he does that and a "pinky sentence" restating the interpretation.

But none of this addresses a much more fundamental problem that affects all types of writing--no matter whether it's fiction, nonfiction, personal writing, summaries, or more involved, reading-connected writing assignments. This problem, which has become the talk of professors at campuses all around the country, is the problem that growing numbers of students have with the basic building blocks of all writing: phrases and sentences.

In none of the many Edweek articles on English and Language Arts do we find any mention of the steep decline in students' ability to write well-formed sentences. But this is arguably the greatest problem with today's writing, which, even at the college and graduate levels, is riddled with comma splices, dangling modifiers, subject-verb agreement problems, and the kind of garbling that results from a dearth of direct instruction and feedback from teachers and a failure by students to review and revise. Here are just a few examples from my growing collection:

1. Comma between subject and verb: Children who experience the world in a more rigid and narrow manner, will have difficulty with social inferences.

2. Comma splice: Generalization is a tough skill for ASD students to learn, teachers are sometimes baffled that they act a certain way in one subject and completely different in other.

3. Failed subject verb agreement: Two of the defining characteristics of autism includes impairments in social interactions and communication.

4. Failed preposition agreement: There are three types of aphasia to which a child can be diagnosed.

5. Dangling modifiers: In thinking about students transitioning from high school to college, the issues of accepting the disability and self-advocacy are crucial.

6. Wordiness: By providing direct instruction, this assists the students with improving their ability to give examples.

7. Awkwardness (and wordiness): Because of these results, it suggests that “object and subject relative sentences” need different amounts of working memory to be understood by the reader.

8. Displaced modifier: I first inquired about this young man’s high school experience, who I will call RC.

9. Incoherence (and wordiness): Due to the fact that these children with autism are unable to proper engage in social situations eliminates the knowledge base that they would normally acquire.

None of the above-described elements of the so-called "Writing Renaissance" will solve these problems. For this, we need direct, sentence-focused writing instruction. Yet, for all the empirical support there is for this kind of instruction, the tide shifted away from it long ago, and it will take a true Writing Renaissance to bring it back.

all teachers should pay attention to anaphora

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Morningside teaches students how to read anaphora, and that my own freshmen students seem to have difficulty understanding anaphora.

I saw another example this week (post here).

Some combinations of words are possible in English, while others are not possible. Every native speaker of English can easily judge that ‘Home computers are now much cheaper’ is a possible English sentence, whereas “Home computers now much are cheaper” is not, because they know that “much” is wrongly positioned in the second example. The ability to recognise such distinctions is evidence that in some sense native speakers already know the rules of grammar, even if they have never formally studied grammar….”
An Introduction to English Grammar by Sidney Greenbaum and Gerald Nelson

Most of my students did not know what the words "such distinctions" referred to. They did not know that the authors were alluding to the distinction they had just made, in the previous sentence, between ‘Home computers are now much cheaper’ and 'Home computers now much are cheaper.'

My students understood the first two sentences of the paragraph perfectly. That wasn't the problem.

They were having a specific problem with the words "such distinctions." They believed that the author had brought up a new issue referring to something 'out in the world,' and they were stumped because they couldn't tell what that new issue might be. What distinctions, out in the world, were the authors talking about?

So now we're focusing directly and explicitly on anaphora in the texts we read.

At the moment I'm thinking you could produce a huge jump in reading comprehension in an awful lot of students just by teaching anaphora comprehension explicitly and making sure students become fluent in reading and understanding anaphora.

I'm also thinking this may be a skill students can pick up quickly.

We'll see.

Glen on Daniel Boone

on the subject of using historical documents to teach reading and writing, Glen writes:

I find the writing in Daniel Boone's autobiography interesting. Here is a man who was raised on the frontier in "Indian country," who had some of what today we would call homeschooling but very little formal schooling. His father justified the state of Daniel's formal literacy by saying that his daughters did the writing and Daniel did the shooting.

So what did a frontiersman with nothing but some homeschooling and Bible study write like, back before the state took over the job of education? Here's how his autobiography begins:

"Curiosity is natural to the soul of man and interesting objects have a powerful influence on our affections. Let these influencing powers actuate, by the permission or disposal of Providence, from selfish or social views, yet in time the mysterious will of Heaven is unfolded, and we behold our conduct, from whatever motives excited, operating to answer the important designs of heaven.

"Thus we behold Kentucky, lately an howling wilderness, the habitation of savages and wild beasts, become a fruitful field...."

Using speeches and other historical documents to teach reading comprehension and writing:
In the Event of Moon Disaster: parallelism, cohesion, the semicolon
Karen H recommends the Gettysburg Address for a lesson in parallelism
Jen on teaching the Star Spangled Banner to her 10-year old (and see Comment thread for more)
Glen on Daniel Boone's autobiography

In the Event of Moon Disaster

Another terrific historical document for use in reading and writing classes, particularly on the subjects of parallelism,  cohesion, and punctuation:^* Bill Safire's "In the Event of Moon Disaster." Transcript and image of the original at Letters of Note.

To: H. R. Haldeman
From: Bill Safire
July 18, 1969.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

PRIOR TO THE PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT:

The President should telephone each of the widows-to-be.

AFTER THE PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT, AT THE POINT WHEN NASA ENDS COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE MEN:

A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to "the deepest of the deep," concluding with the Lord's Prayer.

Each of the widows-to-be.

Terrifying.

^* Semicolons!

Using speeches and other historical documents to teach reading comprehension and writing:
In the Event of Moon Disaster: parallelism, cohesion, the semicolon
Karen H recommends the Gettysburg Address for a lesson in parallelism
Jen on teaching the Star Spangled Banner to her 10-year old (and see Comment thread for more)
Glen on Daniel Boone's autobiography

9th grade students and pronouns

from "The Grammars of Reading" by Eileen Simmons (English Journal Vol. 95, No. 5 May 2006):

One thing I know about my ninth grade students: They come to high school with an extensive background in formal English grammar. They have spent countless hours in elementary school and middle school singing songs and doing worksheets. I'm confident that they passed their grammar tests.

[snip]

My students were actively making meaning from their reading [of The Odyssey] by using rhetorical grammar;^* they were engaging with the text, making connections among words and phrases, and making powerful inferences....

But the progress students were making by charting action and character for difficult passages was not carrying over into their reader-response journals. In spite of my constant admonitions and frequent modeling to "use context--before and after your passage--to read for the answers to your questions," the students were still generating lists of questions without any indication that they were reading for the answers....

In desperation, I pulled out some passages for a directed-response exercise. I gave them a two-column sheet--text in the left column, with a blank right column--and asked them to write their responses in the right column. Once again I told them, "Don't just write questions. Read to find the answers to your questions. That means finding the passage in your book, reading into and out of the passage.^** When I read their responses, I was appalled. Their responses had only a tangential connection to the reading.

Curious, I went back through the stack of papers and a lightbulb went on.

Pronouns. They weren't connecting the pronouns to their antecedents.

Back in the classroom, I announced my discovery and asked students to list personal pronouns I didn't want case, person, or number--just a list of pronouns In all four ninth-grade classes, the room became deathly still. Students looked at me with terrified eyes. Grammar 4 was rearing its ugly head.

"Think about the grammar songs you learned in middle school," I said.

Reading Ms. Simmons' article, I am making my own powerful inference, which is that apparently, inside K-12 English classes, "reader response" means "generating" a list of questions because the teacher told you to.

In this case, generating a list of questions about a work of literature -- The Odyssey -- you can't begin to fathom.

Here's the way things worked back on my home planet:

• Teacher assigns reading
• Students do reading 
• Teacher asks comprehension questions
• Students answer comprehension questions
• Teacher checks answers & makes sure students understand the reading
• Students ask questions about things in the reading they don't understand
• Teacher answers questions about things in the reading students don't understand 
• Serious discussion and analysis begin when the preceding activities have been successfully completed

I don't remember how home-planet teachers handled pronouns and antecedents. Wish I did. I'm guessing teachers didn't handle pronouns and antecedents at all. Instead, teachers gave students reading passages geared to their reading level, and students just gradually and naturally picked up the connection between pronouns and antecedents as they went along. (Did teachers explicitly teach pronouns and antecedents to students who didn't pick the connection up naturally? I'm guessing most did not, but again I don't know.)

The students in Ms. Simmons' class clearly are not prepared to read The Odyssey. I'm not prepared to read The Odyssey, and I am a person who scores 800 on SAT reading. I read The Odyssey along with Chris, the summer before he entered his Jesuit high school. I loved the book, but I didn't have an easy time of it.

^* By "rhetorical grammar," the author means picking out the 'action verbs' in a passage (mostly, but not always, the action verbs in the independent clauses) and figuring out who (mostly who, not what) performed the action. 

^** Do students know what this means?

desperately seeking anaphora

At Morningside Academy I learned that many students have difficulty understanding anaphora, which I am (presently) defining as any expression in a text that:

• refers back to something earlier in the text (the antecedent)
• often possesses a meaning that can't be found out by looking the word or words up in a dictionary

e.g.:

But shortly afterwards both Androcles and the Lion were captured, and the slave was sentenced to be thrown to the Lion, after the latter had been kept without food for several days.
source: Tales of Wonder From Many Lands: A Reader for Composition by Howard Canaan and Joel N. Feimer

"Latter" refers to the Lion, and a dictionary can't tell you that.

Yesterday, in class, I found that most of my students were thrown by this passage. I assume the same has been true of students in all of my previous classes, but I never picked up on it. (aaarggh)

This sentence was a problem, too:

Some holidays are greatly overrated, Valentine's Day is one of them.
source: Hunter College Reading/Writing Center Grammar and Mechnics

Nearly all of the class thought this sentence was correctly punctuated, and not because they had no idea what a complete sentence (or clause) is. (I was pleasantly surprised on the 'what is a complete sentence?' front.)

My students easily pegged "Some holidays are greatly overrated" as a complete sentence, but they vehemently denied that "Valentine's Day is one of them" could be complete because it doesn't make sense on its own. I do mean vehement. I had the same reaction from the rising 8th grader I worked with last week.

From the get-go, two falls ago, when I returned to the classroom, I've been trying to teach my students how to write cohesive prose. Writing cohesive prose means connecting sentences to one another, and connecting sentences to one another means using anaphora.

But now I'm going to be paying close attention to anaphora in reading comprehension, too.

Meanwhile, turns out Erica M. has been dealing with this issue forever:

Catherine, that is EXACTLY the kind of sentence my students have trouble with. That's why I do so many "is it a sentence or not?" drills with my students. They can't tell. Even kids at $40,000/year Manhattan private schools (especially kids at $40,000/year Manhattan private schools!) just can't figure it out. They can't separate grammar from context. That's why they write endless comma splices. I have one student right now, a very bright rising senior at a notoriously progressive Manhattan private school, whom I recently spent an entire session just doing "is it a sentence or not?/punctuate the comma splices" with, and the next practice SAT she took, she still got loads of them wrong! I'm going to keep having to write her drills. I bet that in her entire education, no one has ever made her do this. What disturbs me, though, is that her teachers have apparently looked past the problem for years.

and see:
All good writing consists of good sentences properly joined.

Karen H recommends a Gettysburg address lesson in rhetoric

re: Jen's Star Spangled Banner reading comprehension lesson, Karen H points out that the Gettysburg address offers a terrific example of parallelism. Check out the Teacher Resource Guide Karen pointed me to:

Parallelism Parallelism is a rhetorical technique in which a writer emphasizes the equal value or weight of two or more ideas by expressing them in the same grammatical form. Example, “that nation so conceived,” and “any nation so dedicated.”
List all the examples you can find.

Antithesis Antithesis is a rhetorical technique in which words, phrases, or ideas are strongly contrasted, often by means of a repetition of grammatical structure. In literature, the use of antithesis as a figure of speech, results in two statements that show a contrast through the balancing of two opposite ideas. Example, “the brave men,” and “our poor power.”
List all the examples you can find.

Alliteration The repetition of the same sounds or of the same kinds of sounds at the beginning of words or in stressed syllables. Alliteration is fun to say and enjoyable to hear, and used to call attention to certain words. Alliteration is an important sound technique for mak- ing particular words stand out. It also connects the words to be emphasized. Example, “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we
pray."
List all the examples you can find.

Repetition Repetition is a classic technique in presentation and speech making. It helps tie the theme together and it creates clarity for the listener. Additionally, we remember words and phrases more readily when they are packaged in threes. Example, “We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground."
List all the repetitive examples you can find.

································

Address delivered at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives so that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far sp nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

November 19, 1863. ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Using speeches and other historical documents to teach reading comprehension and writing:
In the Event of Moon Disaster: parallelism, cohesion, the semicolon
Karen H recommends the Gettysburg Address for a lesson in parallelism
Jen on teaching the Star Spangled Banner to her 10-year old (and see Comment thread for more)
Glen on Daniel Boone's autobiography

email from Jen re: reading comprehension & the Star Spangled Banner

I love this lesson ----

I do SAT tutoring and closely followed the posts about reading comprehension (and the lack of skills given to build it in most HS English classes). I also have a 10 yo who mentioned that he didn't really know the words to our national anthem. I pulled up the lyrics to show him and, wow, there was a perfectly sized reading comprehension lesson for a 10 year old. It could be read for understanding, visualized, and then paraphrased and summarized. (As you might imagine, he was just delighted.)
While he may still not know the lyrics perfectly in order, it was a great reading comprehension lesson. It occurred to me that it would be an excellent lesson to have in my pocket as a sub as well.

And after all that, the point of the email! I'd love to see if others on KTM can come up with other similar length or up to a page or two in length selections that could be used as effectively for comprehension, paraphrase, and summary purposes (about age 8 on up). If the passage also hits on cultural/historical/scientific knowledge like this did, even better.

····················

O say can you see by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

update 8/17/2012: Karen H points out that the Gettysburg address offers a terrific example of parallelism and other rhetorical techniques.


Using speeches and other historical documents to teach reading comprehension and writing:
In the Event of Moon Disaster: parallelism, cohesion, the semicolon
Karen H recommends the Gettysburg Address for a lesson in parallelism
Jen on teaching the Star Spangled Banner to her 10-year old (and see Comment thread for more)
Glen on Daniel Boone's autobiography

2 + 2

3 factoids:

• Public schools stopped teaching grammar decades ago because the NCTE believes teaching grammar in isolation does not improve writing. In lieu of explicit instruction, students are expected to acquire their knowledge of grammar via reading and writing. Grammar is "caught, not taught." (Phyllis Davenport)
• Reading comprehension falls apart in the 4th grade. The 4th grade slump was identified and named by Jeanne Chall in the early 1980s. 

• The syntactic complexity of the texts children read increases each year, eventually becoming more complex than anything children hear in conversation. This point is reached in the 4th grade. We have Jeanne Chall to thank for this insight, too.

So, starting in 4th grade children are supposed to learn grammar by reading texts written in a grammatical register they have never heard in conversation and never will hear in conversation. Writing is not talking, no matter how smart your parents are.

And, also starting in 4th grade, children's rate of progress in reading comprehension collapses.

Nobody seems to have noticed the coincidence. The National Reading Panel doesn't talk about syntax, E.D. Hirsch doesn't talk about syntax, and the NCTE is interested only in the question of whether formal instruction in grammar improves writing. Not reading.

No one seems to have asked himself whether it was all those precision diagrams of yore that brought children to the level of syntactical fluency that allowed 4th graders to read McGuffy Readers and 10th graders to read Dickens.

Instead, it's been left to speech-language pathologists to discover the fact that if you want children to read, you had better teach them how to read sentences, not just words.

reform writing (Robert Connors on the Erasure of the Sentence)

a difficult passage - & terrific advice

[Terri] LeClercq offers a very helpful technique to check for coherence in a multi-paragraph text: As you edit your rough draft, separate each topic sentence from your text and examine each one to make sure it is a strong introduction to the main idea of that paragraph. Then examine the coherence of the topic sentences as they relate to the overall thesis set-up by seeing whether the topic sentences form a coherent paragraph.
“Writing Good Paragraphs with Topic Sentences.” Legal Writing Tips 1.8 (2005). Print. Web. 14 March 2012.

My students had trouble with this passage today. They understood the first and second sentences (the 2 independent clauses linked by the colon), but they stumbled over the last one.

I'm not crazy about the last sentence myself: reading it, you have to keep too much information lit up in working memory until you finally get to the most important bit, which is at the very end. The end is where the most important bit usually should be, but still. There's an awful lot to hang on to until you get there.

I don't mean to sound harsh. That last sentence is perfectly serviceable, and impressive in its way. It's nicely linked to its partner sentence, the one that comes just before it, and it manages to pack a great deal of information into a small space, which is not easy. You'd have to be an experienced writer to write it.

Nevertheless, if it were my sentence, I would keep on writing it before I stopped. I would revise.

Teaching basic composition, I've come to realize how important it is for college students to be able to read prose I wouldn't advise any of them actually to write. A fair portion of academic and professional prose is not very good, and some of it is god-awful. But students have to read it.

Of course everyone knows this, but I hadn't thought about the implications until now. College students have to be able to read bad writing. Not just difficult writing, not just sophisticated writing, not just writing with a lot of big words. College students have to be able to read all those things, but they also have to be able to read difficult, sophisticated writing with a lot of big words that is bad.

So how do they acquire this skill?

Composition textbooks come stocked with dozens of heavily copy-edited essays written by journalists and originally published in popular books and magazines: these are works that have been professionally engineered to be maximally swift, cohesive, and clear. They make sense as models for writing, but they're useless for reading. They're so well written they practically read themselves.^*

Where are the composition texts featuring 100s of pages of dense and mystifying academic prose, I ask?

And how does one teach students to read badly-written prose?

Is it different from teaching students to read well-written prose?

I'm thinking it might be.

Last but not least, speaking of bad and good prose, I think LeClercq's advice is brilliant. It's an amazing fit for William Kerrigan's X-1-2-3s.

X-1-2-3

^* I don't remotely believe that well-written prose practically reads itself. Certain genres, however, are written to be effortlessly readable, and that's the writing that appears in college composition texts.

gobsmacked

I'd read chemprof's and EM's descriptions of very bright students with serious reading problems, and I'd been appropriately horrified. But until this morning I'm not sure I really, truly grasped what they were talking about. Which is: very bright, very talented students who have major problems reading and who haven't been diagnosed with dyslexia.

This morning, one of the smartest students I've ever had reluctantly showed me the thesis statement he'd just written. He didn't want me to look at it because the spelling was bad, and I won't post it without permission. I'll just say that he had misspellings on the order of 'charitturs" for characters; "sirve" for serve; and "morle" for moral. Of 19 words, 9 are misspelled, and the words spelled correctly include only one noun.

His spelling is so bad, he said, that spellcheck doesn't work. At some point his laptop decided he might be writing in Spanish, so half the time spellcheck serves up a menu of Spanish options. When Microsoft Word does present him with a selection of words in English, my student often has no idea which one to pick.

I had him read out loud a difficult paragraph, written by Maria Tatar, on fairy tales. He could more or less do it (he's very sharp), but he kept missing the short words: prepositions and short verbs, too, I think. He kept missing the short words because he automatically filled in whatever word he thought would come next instead of reading the word that actually did come next. (I guess somebody taught him to 'make predictions.')

Here's an example of what I mean (I don't remember whether he misread this section):

Like many fairy tales, the Grimms’ narrative begins by framing a prohibition

He would likely trip over 'by,' reading it as 'with' instead (or whatever word seemed most likely to appear). Although he can spell all the prepositions -- prepositions are the main words he can spell -- he often misreads them.

Another problem: he doesn't read left-to-right. Instead, he jumps around in a sentence looking for words he can base his reading of the sentence in: he's looking for a kind of anchor word, I think. Once he's found an anchor word, he goes back to the beginning of the sentence and starts over. Then, if he has no luck on the second go-round, he'll jump forward again and look for a second anchor word that might help.

He couldn't read the word "prohibition" at all, but he demonstrated for me the method he would use to tackle it. He would start with the syllable "pro," which he could read; then he would hit "hibition," which he couldn't read at all. Then he would skip to "tion" at the end (which he saw as a separate syllable - that's good). Then he would try to guess "prohibition" on the basis of "pro" and "tion."

And he would fail, in spite of the fact that he does indeed know the word 'prohibition' and recognized it the moment I said it.

He's in his mid-20s, he's extremely intelligent, and he cannot read "prohibition" using phonics and syllables.

I know very little about dyslexia, so I don't know whether that's an issue. I do know a little about phonics, and it seems clear that he doesn't read phonetically. At least, not fluently. I'm sure he was taught to read using whole language or balanced literacy. As a child he memorized all the words he was taught and then, via high IQ, high energy, and a scrappy personality, figured out how to reverse-engineer paragraphs in order to wrest some meaning from them.

Interestingly, his problems have led him to a theory of paragraph development I've been mulling over myself: he believes paragraphs typically have a concluding sentence that sums everything up. He reads that sentence first, then goes back to the beginning of the paragraph to try and decipher the whole thing.

I've been wondering whether paragraphs have conclusions and have been operating under the theory that most of them do not. Now I wonder.

He can't really write at all (he says -- he's so verbal, I find that hard to believe). But he has somehow figured out how to think in whole paragraphs -- maybe even in whole 5-paragraph essays or perhaps beyond. Today he actually came up with a sophisticated thesis sentence AND three coherent supporting topic sentences almost entirely in his head. He says he got through high school on oral presentations, and by oral presentation he doesn't mean Powerpoint. He means thesis, topic sentence, elaboration, and specific support. He produces more content talking than I have the working memory to deal with: he's got to figure out how to write if only so other people will be able to follow what he's saying.

This is a guy trading in complex ideas entirely inside the oral register. You can't do that! (Well, you can, but most of us can't 'hear' it ---- )

He told me a few weeks back that when he was a kid his school introduced a new reading program that was so terrible, and left him with such profound spelling deficits, that his parents had wanted to sue the school. No surprise there.

Of course, as we know, a parent can't sue a school for failing to teach their very bright child to spell. Educational malpractice doesn't exist.

Question. What is the way forward here? (If he wants a way forward, that is. He's not a kid, and he's figured out work-arounds that are serving him reasonably well.)

It strikes me that he needs to look into voice recognition software ---- although to use voice recognition software for writing anything more serious than a short email you have to be able to read what you've dictated. So I'm sure about that.....

He says he's often thought he needs to take ESL classes in English.

That doesn't strike me as a bad idea -- I've begun to rely upon lessons in English as a second language myself -- but I think what he really needs is phonics. Phonics and a lot of practice reading left-to-right. His jump-around habits are ingrained; he'd need to practice until he developed a new ingrained left-to-right habit.

Is there a phonics program anyone out there would recommend for this student?

Other thoughts or suggestions?

Mooping the lady (& children with ADHD)

Two-year olds can tell the difference between "the lady mooped my brother" and "the lady and my brother mooped!" (pdf file)

I love that.

Meanwhile, people with Parkinson's can have trouble understanding sentences like:

"The king that is pulled by the cook is short." (pdf file)

The words "That is pulled by the cook" are a "center-embedded" relative clause.

I'm intrigued by the Parkinson's research because Parkinson's and ADHD both involve dopamine deficits and problems in "set-shifting"— and impaired set-shifting appears to be the stumbling block for Parkinson's patients reading about the king and the cook. All of a sudden, mid-sentence, they have to shift off their expectation that what they are reading is a standard Subject-Verb-Object affair. That's where they stumble.

Do kids with ADHD also have trouble reading such sentences?

I wonder.

I gave Arthur Whimbey's zoonoses test to my class two weeks ago. Around 40% of my students got the answer wrong, which is what I've seen in my other classes.

Assuming I'm reading (make that skimming) the Parkinson's article right, the answer for ADHD kids having trouble with center-embedded relative clauses would presumably be to give them lots of practice reading sentences with center-embedded relative clauses.

On the other hand, I can also imagine practice with center-embedded relative clauses making it more difficult for kids with ADHD to read any sentence....?

Is there research on this?

Lingua Links: What is a relative clause?