“Here’s the point: Virtually all teachers believe they are teaching reading comprehension—they spend many hours on it every week, especially at the elementary level, beginning in kindergarten. Their training, their materials, their supervisors have all led them to focus on comprehension “skills and strategies,” which include demonstrating things like “how to find the main idea” and “making inferences,” using texts on a random variety of topics. Children then practice these supposed skills on books at their individual reading level, which may be years below their grade level—and, again, not organized by topic. The theory is that if children master these “skills,” they’ll be able to use them to understand any text that’s put in front of them—including the reading passages on standardized tests and, eventually, things they’ll need to read in high school and beyond. What scientists have discovered, however, is that “skills” are far less important to comprehension than the amount of knowledge the reader has about the topic. As with the science behind phonics, most teachers are unaware of that finding. And, just as many teachers have been cautioned that “too much” phonics will kill a child’s love of reading, they’ve been trained to believe it’s a bad idea to directly impart information to students—when in fact it’s often a necessary foundation for building knowledge.”
"All prose has factual gaps that must be filled by the reader. Consider “I promised not to play with it, but Mom still wouldn’t let me bring my Rubik’s Cube to the library.” The author has omitted three facts vital to comprehension: you must be quiet in a library; Rubik’s Cubes make noise; kids don’t resist tempting toys very well. If you don’t know these facts, you might understand the literal meaning of the sentence, but you’ll miss why Mom forbade the toy in the library.
You might think, then, that authors should include all the information needed to understand what they write. Just tell us that libraries are quiet. But those details would make prose long and tedious for readers who already know the information. “Write for your audience” means, in part, gambling on what they know.
These examples help us understand why readers might decode well but score poorly on a test; they lack the knowledge the writer assumed in the audience.
Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It’s treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge. That suggests three significant changes in schooling.
First, it points to decreasing the time spent on literacy instruction in early grades. Third-graders spend 56 percent of their time on literacy activities but 6 percent each on science and social studies. This disproportionate emphasis on literacy backfires in later grades, when children’s lack of subject matter knowledge impedes comprehension. Another positive step would be to use high-information texts in early elementary grades. Historically, they have been light in content.”
With regards to speed reading programs….
Debunking “Take in More Information at at Time”:
“Readers are supposed to learn to taken in bigger chunks of text by training their eyes to process information in the periphery and using specialized techniques for scanning the page. There’s the strategy of using a finger to guide the eyes across the page in a zigzag pattern; another method is to move your finger down the center of the page in order to read down, a line at a time, rather than from left to right. The problem with such methods should also be obvious: they flagrantly defy constraints imposed by the visual system. The injunction to take in whole lines, paragraphs, or pages cannot be achieved by the human visual system, short of growing additional cells on one’s retina. We cannot will ourselves to recognize more letters in the periphery any more than we can will ourselves to hear sounds in the dog-whistle frequency range.”
Debunking “Eliminate Subvocalization”:
“Most people have the sense that they are saying words to themselves (or hearing them) as they read. Speed-reading programs appeal to the intuition that this habit slows reading. Speed-reading programs exhort people to suppress subvocalization, providing exercises to promote the practice.
The sensation that you use information related to the pronunciations of words while you read is not an illusion. However, skilled readers do something different: they mentally activate the phonological code that allows one to hear the differences between PERmit and perMIT in the mind’s ear. The fallacy in the argument against subvocalization is in equating phonology with speech. Using the phonological code doesn’t limit the reader to the rate at which speech can be produced because there’s no speaking involved.
What if the inability to use phonological information efficiently is one of the main characteristics of reading impairments? What if skilled readers cannot prevent themselves from activating phonological information because it is so deeply integrated with spelling and meaning in writing systems and in the neural circuits that support reading?
These what-ifs are indeed the case, as established by several decades of research. Speed-reading schemes would improve reading by eliminating one of the main sources of reading skill.”
Debunking “Eliminate Regressive Eye Movements":
“Read it right the first time. But, like phonology, regressive eye movements serve a useful function, and eliminating them makes it harder to read, not easier. They don’t only occur because a text has been misread; they also allow readers to enhance their understanding beyond what could be obtained on the first pass. Some looking back is also inevitable because of the nature of language. Sentences unfold in a linear sequence, but the messages they convey often do not. The efficient coping strategy—the one that skilled readers discover—incorporates intermittent regressions as one component. We have ways to eliminate them, but they won’t make you a more efficient reader. Just annoyed.”
Remember “Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP)”?
“A method called rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) seems more promising. A text is presented at a single location on a screen, one word (or sometimes a few) at a time. It was developed for research purposes in the 1960s. When personal computers became common, it was sold as a reading improvement tool; now there are apps. A YouTube video presents Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in this format. The text is delivered at a spot on the screen, like a series of flash cards. Readers are liberated from having to decide how much time to spend on each word because that is set in advance, and saccades, regressive eye movements, line sweeps, and page turning have been eliminated.
Was the “Raven” video encouraging? The text is presented at about 278 words per minute, within the skilled reading range, yet requires extra effort to understand. Every word, whether door or morrow, is displayed for the same amount of time. The reader loses control over the rate of transmission and, with it, the ability to allocate reading time intelligently. The experience feels like stalking the text rather than reading it.
If reading at megaspeeds is not feasible, does that mean reading can’t be improved? Not at all.
The serious way to improve reading—how well we comprehend a text and, yes, speed and efficiency—is this (apologies, Michael Pollan):
Read. Reading skill depends on knowledge acquired from reading. Skilled readers know more about language, including many words and structures that occur in print but not in speech. They also have greater “background knowledge,” familiarity with the structure and content of what is being read. We acquire this information in the act of reading itself—not by training our eyes to rotate in opposite directions, playing brain exercise games, or breathing diaphragmatically. Just reading.
As much as possible. Every time we read we update our knowledge of language. At a conscious level we read a text for its content: because it is a story or a textbook or a joke. At a subconscious level our brains automatically register information about the structure of language; the next chapter is all about this. Developing this elaborate linguistic network requires exposure to a large sample of texts.
Mostly new stuff. Knowledge of language expands through exposure to structures we do not already know. That may mean encountering unfamiliar words or familiar words used in novel ways. It may mean reading P. D. James, E. L. James, and Henry James because their use of language is so varied. A large sample of texts in varied styles and genres will work, including some time spent just outside one’s textual comfort zone.
Reading expands one’s knowledge of language and the world in ways that increase reading skill, making it easier and more enjoyable to read. Increases in reading skill make it easier to consume the texts that feed this learning machinery. It is not the eyes but what we know about language, print, and the world— knowledge that is easy to increase by reading—that determines reading skill. Where this expertise leads, the eyes will follow."