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On the Pseudoscience of Strategies-Based

Reading Comprehension Instruction,

or What Current Reading Comprehension Instruction

Has in Common with Astrology

Bob Shepherd

Permit me to start with an analogy. As a hobby, I make and repair guitars. This is exacting work,

requiring precise measurement. If the top (or soundboard) of a guitar is half a millimeter too thin, the

wood may crack along the grain. If the top is half a millimeter too thick, the guitar will not properly

resonate. For a classical guitar soundboard made of Engelmann spruce (the usual material), the ideal

thickness is between 1.5 and 2 mm, depending on the width of the woodgrain. However, experienced

luthiers typically dome their soundboards, adding thickness (about half a millimeter) around the edges,

at the joins, and in the area just around the soundhole (to accommodate an inset, decorative rosette

and to compensate for the weakness introduced by cutting the hole).

To measure an object this precisely, one needs good measuring equipment. To measure around the

soundhole, one might use a device like this, a Starrett micrometer that sells for about $450:

It probably goes without saying that one doesn’t use an expensive, precision tool like this for a purpose

for which it was not designed. You could use it to tap in frets, but you wouldn’t want to, obviously. It

wouldn’t do the job properly, and you would end up destroying both the work and the tool.

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But that’s just what Reading teachers and English teachers are now doing, almost universally, when they

teach “reading comprehension.” They are applying astonishingly sophisticated tools—the minds of

their students—in ways that they were not designed to work, and in the process, they are doing

significant damage. To understand why the default method for teaching reading comprehension now

being implemented in our classrooms fails, utterly, to work, one has to understand how the internal

mechanism for language is designed to operate.

Linguists, since Chomsky, use the phrase Language Acquisition Device, or LAD, to refer to the innate

mechanism—hardwired into the human brain—for learning spoken language, including grammar and

vocabulary. The parts of the brain that carry out this learning work coordinate with other parts of the

brain that do pattern recognition (for decoding) and long-term storage and retrieval of knowledge about

the world (for recognizing context and reference) to form the complex mental tool for comprehending

texts. Sadly, English teachers, reading teachers, curriculum coordinators, education professors, test

makers, the leaders of textbook companies, and the bureaucrats and politicians who mandate state

testing of reading typically understand almost nothing of how the internal tools for comprehending a

text work, for almost to a person, they know very little of contemporary linguistic and cognitive science,

and so instead of basing their instruction and assessment on those sciences, they fall back on

unexamined folk ideas—established habits of the tribe—and implement instruction and assessment

that can most charitably be described as prescientific folk-theory and superstition. The internal tool—

the language mechanism of the student brain—is not designed to work in the ways in which “reading

comprehension specialists” are asking students to use it. Ironically, the person with the doctorate in

Reading Comprehension from an education school is the one most likely to be wedded to prescientific

techniques (pedagogy) and materials (curricula and assessments). Such people direct reading instruction

in our schools, and the result is predictable: kids who don’t read on their own, typically, for pleasure

because they can’t—because for them reading is too difficult to be enjoyable.

The Persistence of the Prescientific

In the past fifty years, we have had dramatic scientific revolutions in both linguistics and in cognitive

psychology. We now know a lot about how language and knowledge are acquired and about how people

make sense of texts, and almost none of this science has made its way into instructional techniques

and materials. A digression on the history of physics will provide an illuminating contrast to the current

state of reading instruction.

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In their brilliant and accessible little book The Evolution of Physics, Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld

describe how Galileo used a thought experiment to overturn the 1700 -year-old Aristotelian notion that

objects in motion contain a motive force that is used up until they come to rest. Galileo imagined using

oil to make the object travel further. Then he imagined using a perfect oil that would perfectly reduce

the friction acting on the object. The result was the idea codified in Newton’s First Law of Motion:

objects don’t move until they use up their force; instead, they persevere indefinitely (forever) in uniform

motion until they are acted upon by an external force that changes their motion. The Aristotelian notion

is entirely intuitive. The Galilean/Newtonian notion is quite counterintuitive. However, the Aristotelian

notion is false, and the Galilean/Newtonian one true. Aristotle’s was a prescientific folk theory of

motion. It made sense to people, but it was wrong, wrong, wrong, and the development of modern

technology and science was not possible until it was overthrown.

Other folk and pseudo-scientific theories of physics and astrophysics have held sway throughout the

centuries—the theory that fire is the release, during combustion, of an element called phlogiston; the

theory that light propagates as waves in an invisible medium called the ether that fills space; the theory

that heavier objects fall faster than light ones do; the theory that the Earth is flat; the theory that the

sun travels across the sky; the theory that the Earth is at the center of the universe and that planets

revolve around it in epicycles—spheres within spheres. All these notions made sense based on people’s

everyday observations and their intuitive thinking about those observations, and all were absolutely

wrong.

Now, imagine that you go into a high school in the United States today (in 2016), pick up an introductory

physical science text, and find that it teaches the Aristotelian theory of motion, the phlogiston theory of

fire, and the waves-through-ether theory of light propagation. Suppose the space science textbook in

that school teaches that a flat earth sits at the center of the universe and that planets travel around it in

epicycles. You would be shocked, appalled, scandalized. But, of course, this would never happen. Our

physics textbooks try to teach elementary contemporary physics.

But walk into almost any K-12 school in the United States today and you will find instructional and

assessment techniques and materials that are built upon prescientific, folk theories of grammar,

vocabulary acquisition, and reading comprehension that are completely at odds with our contemporary

scientific understandings of these. Walk into teacher training institutions and you will find, typically, that

the prescientific, folk theories are the ones being taught. Pick up any state or district interim reading

assessment, and you will find that they were built on these folk theories.

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What Reading Comprehension Involves

In order to read a text with comprehension, one needs to be able to

1. Interpret automatically (unconsciously and fluidly) the symbols being used (the phonics

component of decoding). Note that this crucial precursor for reading comprehension requires

that the student be able to recognize, quickly and without effort and, indeed, without conscious

rehearsal of the fact that they are doing so, the roughly 42 separate sound-symbol

correspondences of written English.

2. Parse automatically (unconsciously and fluidly) the syntax of the sentences (the grammar

component of decoding). Note that this crucial precursor for reading comprehension requires

that the student be able to parse, quickly and without effort and, indeed, without conscious

rehearsal of the fact that they are doing so, many thousands of syntactic forms.

3. Interpret the meanings of the words and phrases (based on what they refer to and how they are

used in relevant real-world contexts). Note that this crucial element of reading comprehension

depends, fundamentally, upon specific world knowledge in the domain that the text treats. A

contemporary philosophy text might use words like defeasible, propositional calculus, modal

operator, zombie, counterfactual, supervenience, indexicality, and grue, and one will have to

know how these words are used in contemporary philosophy and quite a bit about how they are

related to one another in order to understand the text at all.

4. Recognize the kairos, or total context, of the text (its who, what, where, when, why, and how,

including its genre, or type, the concerns of its author, and its literary and rhetorical

conventions). Note that this crucial element of reading comprehension depends upon prior

experience with similar extra-textual elements.

Let’s look at each of these in turn to learn what science now tells us about them and how our reading

comprehension instruction goes wrong.

Phonics and Reading Comprehension

This is the one bright spot in our reading instruction, an area where practice has caught up to scientific

understanding. However, it’s taken us a while to get there. In the middle of the last century, we were

using what is known as the “Look-Say” method for teaching kids to decode texts. This method was

enshrined in such curricula as the Dick and Jane readers. The method was based on a now-discredited

Behaviorist theory that saw language learning as repeated exposure to increasingly complex language

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stimuli paired with ostensive objects (in the case of the Dick and Jane readers, with illustrations). See

Dick run. Dick runs fast. See, see, how fast Dick runs. The theory of language learning by mere

association of the stimulus and its object dates all the way back to St. Augustine, who wrote in his

Confessions:

When grown-ups named some object and at the same time turned towards it, I perceived this, and I grasped that the thing was signified by the sound they uttered, since they meant to point it out. . . . In this way, little by little, I learnt to understand what things the words, which I heard uttered in their respective places in various sentences, signified. And once I got my tongue around these signs, I used them to express my wishes.1

It’s an intuitive theory, like the theory that moving objects use up their force until they stop, but like that

theory, it’s wrong. Look-Say was a flawed approach because it was based on a false theory of how

language was acquired. The fullest exposition of that flawed theory can be found in B.F. Skinner’s Verbal

Behavior (1957). In 1959, Noam Chomsky, who has done more than anyone to create a true science of

language learning, delivered a devastating blow to behaviorist theories of language learning in a seminal

review of Skinner’s book.2 Basically, Chomsky described aspects of language, such as its embedded

recursiveness and infinite generativity, that, like jazz improvisation, cannot be explained solely on the

basis of responses to stimuli. More about the Chomskian revolution later.

Toward the end of the last century, hundreds of thousands of educators around the country embraced

something called “Whole Language instruction.” Proponents argued that it wasn’t necessary to teach

kids sound-symbol correspondences because language was learned automatically, in meaningful

contexts. The idea was that one simply had to expose kids to meaningful language at their level, and the

decoding stuff would take care of itself, in the absence of explicit decoding instruction. Those states and

school districts that adopted Whole Language approaches saw their students’ reading scores fall

precipitously. Education is given to such fads and to such disastrous results.

A little knowledge of linguistic science would have prevented the debacle that was Whole Language. The

best current scientific thinking is that language emerged some 50,000-to-70,000 years ago. For many

thousands of years, people learned to use spoken language without explicit instruction. However,

writing is a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s been around for only about 5,000 years (It emerged in

Mesopotamia around 3,000 BCE, in China around 1,200 BCE, and in Mesoamerica around 600 BCE). Both

the Look-Say and Whole Language proponents failed to recognize that spoken language has been 1 Augustine, Confessions. Quoted in Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 4th ed. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.2 Chomsky, Noam. “Verbal Behavior. By B.F. Skinner.” Language (1959) 35:26-58.

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around long enough for brains to evolve specific mechanisms for learning it automatically, in the

absence of explicit instruction, but that this is not true of writing. There is no evolved, internal

mechanism, in the brain, specifically wired for decoding of written language, as there is for spoken

language. Instead, decoding of written symbols and associating them with speech sounds requires,

usually, explicit instruction. Such decoding appropriates general pattern recognition abilities of the

brain and puts them to this particular use. Some few children are good enough at pattern recognition

and get enough exposure to sound-symbol correspondences to be able to learn to decode in the

absence of explicit instruction in interpretation of those correspondences, but those kids often don’t

develop the automaticity needed for truly fluent reading. There is now no question about this: There is

voluminous research showing that most students have to be taught phonics (sound-symbol

correspondences) explicitly if they are to learn to decode fluently. For excellent reviews of this research,

see Diane McGuiness’s Early Reading Instruction: What Science Really Tells Us about How to Teach

Reading. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT P., 2004, and Why Our Children Can’t Read and What We Can

Do about It: A Scientific Revolution in Reading. New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1999.

The Look-Say advocates got their ideas from simplistic Behaviorist models of learning, but where did the

Whole Language people get theirs? Well, from listening at the keyholes of linguists. As often happens in

education, professional educators half heard and half understood something being said by scientists and

applied it in a crazy fashion. What they half heard was that linguists were saying that language is learned

automatically. The part that they missed is that the linguists were talking about spoken language, not

written.

The upshot: In order to be able to comprehend texts, there is a prerequisite: automaticity with regard to

decoding of sound-symbol correspondences. Where does one get this automaticity? From explicit

phonics instruction. This is a lesson that we have learned. The science has caught up with classroom

practice, and most elementary schools now use, successfully, an explicit early phonics curriculum. That’s

the good news. Now for the rest, which is not so good.

Grammatical Fluency

In the last decade of the twentieth century, the U.S. Department of Education committed billions of

dollars to an initiative called Reading First, with the aim of improving reading among schoolchildren

nationwide. It’s a mark of how scientifically backward and benighted our professional reading

establishment is that when the directors of this program consulted with “experts” and outlined the

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areas of focus to be addressed by Reading First (and assessed by reading examinations), they included

among items to be addressed by the program students’ decoding skills (phonemic awareness and

phonics), vocabulary, and comprehension but completely ignored grammatical fluency. However, and

this ought to be obvious, written texts consist of sentences that have particular syntactic patterns. If

students cannot automatically—that is, fluently and unconsciously—parse the syntactic patterns

being used, then they might have some idea what the subject of the text is, but they won’t have a

ghost of a chance of understanding what the text is saying. Syntactic complexity is a significant

determinant of complexity and readability. Consider the opening two sentences of the Declaration of

Independence:

Sentence One:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the

political bands which have connected them with one another and to assume among the powers

of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God

entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare

which impel them to the separation.

Sentence Two:

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed

by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, Liberty and the

pursuit of Happiness—that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,

deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, ---that whenever any form of

Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to

abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundations on such principles and

organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and

Happiness.

These sentences contain a few vocabulary items that might be challenging to young people— impel,

endowed, and unalienable—but for the most part, the words used have high frequency and present no

great challenge. The most significant stumbling block for comprehension of these sentences is their

syntactic complexity. The first sentence consists of a long adverbial clause, beginning with When in the

Course and ending with entitle them, that specifies the conditions under which it is necessary to take the

action described in a main clause that follows it (a decent respect . . . requires). The second sentence

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consists of a main clause that introduces a list in the form of five relative clauses, each specifying a truth

held to be self evident. Here’s the point: the student who can’t follow the basic syntactic form of these

sentences will be completely lost. He or she won’t understand how a given idea in one of these

sentences relates to another idea in them (for that is what syntax does; it relates ideas in particular

ways). An automatic, fluid grasp of the syntax of a sentence is critical to comprehending what it

means. What’s true of complicated sentences like these from the Declaration of Independence is true of

sentences in general. One can’t comprehend them if one cannot parse their syntax automatically

(quickly and unconsciously). Grammatical competence is one of the keys to decoding, and decoding is

a prerequisite for comprehension.

So, are schools today ensuring via their instructional methods and assessments that students are gaining

the automatic syntactic fluency necessary for decoding? Well, no. In fact, they are implementing

materials based on a folk theory of grammar that predates the current scientific model of language

acquisition. Consider, for example, this gem from the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English

Language Arts, which provide the outline for current instruction in English and reading. According to the

CCSS, an eighth-grade student should be able to

Explain the function of verbals (gerunds, participles, infinitives) in general and their function in

particular sentences. (CCSS.ELA-Literacy-L.8.1a).

The other grammar-related “standards” in the CCSS are similar. They all show that at the highest levels

in our educational establishment, there is a complete lack of understanding of what science now tells

us about how the grammar of a language is acquired. The standard instantiates a prescientific, folk

theory of grammar that assumes that it is explicitly acquired and is available for explicit description by

someone who knows it (“Explain the function”).

This standard tells us that students are to be instructed in and assessed on the ability a) to explain the

function of verbals (gerunds, participles, and infinitives) in general and b) their function in particular

sentences. In order for students to be able to do this, they will have to be taught how to identify

gerunds, participles, and infinitives and how to explain their functions generally and in particular

sentences. In order for the standard to be met, these bits of grammatical taxonomy will have to be

explicitly taught and explicitly learned, for the standard requires students to be able to make explicit

explanations. Now, there is a difference between having learned an explicit grammatical taxonomy and

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having acquired competence in using the grammatical forms listed in that taxonomy. The authors of the

standard seem not to have understood this.

Let’s think about the kind of activity that this standard envisions our having students do. Identifying the

functions of verbals in sentences would require students to be able to do, among other things,

something like this:

Underline the gerund phrases in the following sentences and tell whether each is functioning as

a subject, direct object, indirect object, object of a preposition, predicate nominative, retained

object, subjective complement, objective complement, or appositive of any of these.

That’s what’s entailed by PART of the standard. And since the standard just mentions verbals generally

and not any of the many forms that these can take, one doesn’t know whether it covers, for example,

infintives used without the infinitive marker “to,” so-called “bare infinitives,” as in “Let there be peace.”

(Compare “John wanted there to be peace.”) Obviously, meeting this ONE standard would require

YEARS of explicit, formal instruction in syntax, and what contemporary linguistic science teaches us is

that all of that instruction would be completely irrelevant to students being able to formulate and

comprehend sentences.

Contemporary linguistic science teaches that the grammar of a language is learned not through explicit

instruction in grammatical forms but, rather, automatically (fluently and unconsciously) via the

operation of an internal mechanism dedicated to such learning. Permit me an example. If you are a

native speaker of English, you know that

the green, great dragon

“sounds weird” (e.g., is ungrammatical) and that

the great, green dragon

“sounds fine” (e.g., is grammatical).

That’s because, based on the ambient linguistic environment in which you came of age, you intuited,

automatically, without your being aware that you were doing so, a complex set of rules governing the

proper syntax of adjectives in a series. No one taught you, explicitly, these rules governing the order of

precedence of adjectives in English, and the chances are that you cannot even state the rules that you

nonetheless know. And what’s true of this set of rules is true of all but a miniscule portion of the

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grammar of a language that a speaker “knows”—that he or she can use. Knowledge of grammar is like

knowledge of how to walk. It is not conscious knowledge. The walker did not learn to do so by studying

the physics of motion and the operation of motor neurons, bones, and muscles. The brain and body are

designed in such a way as to do these things automatically. The same is true, contemporary linguistic

science teaches us, of the learning of the grammar of a language. Speakers and writers of English follow

hundreds of thousands of rules, such as the C-command condition on the binding of anaphors (a key

component of the syntax of languages worldwide), that they know nothing about explicitly. Following

this rule, they will say that “The president may blame himself” but will never say “Supporters of the

president may blame himself,”3 which violates the rule, even though they were never taught the rule

explicitly and could not explain, unless they have had an introductory Syntax course, what the rule is

that they have been following all their lives. Since the ground-breaking work by Noam Chomsky in the

1950s, we have over the past sixty years developed a robust scientific model of how the grammar of a

language is acquired. It is acquired unconsciously and automatically by an internal language acquisition

mechanism.

Like many great thinkers, Chomsky started with a simple question, asking himself how it is possible that

most children gain a reasonable degree of mastery over something as complicated as a spoken

language. With almost no direct instruction, almost every child learns, within a few years’ time, enough

of his or her language to be able to communicate with ease most of what he or she wishes to

communicate. This learning seems not to be correlated with the child’s general intelligence and fails to

occur only when there is a physical problem with the child’s brain or in conditions of extreme

deprivation in which the child has limited exposure to language. If one looks scientifically at what a child

knows of his or her language at the age of, say, six or seven, it turns out that that knowledge is

extraordinarily complex. Furthermore, almost all of what the child knows has not been directly and

explicitly taught. For example, long before going to school and without being taught what direct objects

and objects of prepositions are, an English- speaking child understands that the first two sentences,

below, “sound right” and that the second two sentences do not.

Jose threw the football.

The football landed in the neighbor’s yard.

* The football threw Jose.

3 The examples are from Radford, Andrew. Minimalist Syntax. New York: Cambridge U.P., 2004.

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* Landed the football the yard neighbor’s in.

In other words, on some level, the English-speaking child “knows” that objects follow (and do not

precede) the verbs and prepositions that govern them, even though he or she has no clue what objects,

verbs, and prepositions are. The Japanese child, in contrast, “knows” just as well that in Japanese

objects precede (and do not follow) the verbs and prepositions that govern them. So, imagine that the

sentences, above, were translated word-by-word into Japanese and that the word order were retained.

To a Japanese child, the word order of the first two sentences above would sound quite strange, while

the word order of the second two sentences would be unexceptional—just the opposite from English.

English is a head first language, in which the head of a grammatical phrase precedes its objects and

complements. Japanese is a head-last language, in which the head of a grammatical phrase follows its

objects and complements. Kids are not taught this. They are born with part of the grammar (the fact

that there are heads, objects, and complements, for example) already hard wired into their heads. Then,

based on their ambient linguistic environments, they automatically set certain parameters of the hard-

wired internal grammar, such as head position. Children do not learn such rules by being taught them

any more than a whale learns to echolocate by attending echolocation classes.

Chomsky’s central insight was that in order for a child to be able to learn a spoken language with such

rapidity and thoroughness, that child must be born with large portions of a universal grammar of

language already hardwired into his or her head. So, for example, the neural mechanisms that provide

for classification of items from the stream of speech into verbs and prepositions and objects, and those

mechanisms that allow verbs and prepositions to govern their objects, are inborn. They are part of the

equipment with which human children come into the world. Then, when a child hears a particular

language, English or Japanese, for example, certain parameters of the inborn language mechanism, such

as the position of objects with respect to their governors, are set by a completely unconscious,

autonomic process that is itself part of the innate neural machinery for language learning.

Because the learning of a grammar is done automatically and unconsciously by the brain, explicit

instruction in grammatical forms of the kind called for by the Common Core State Standard quoted

above is irrelevant. And, in fact, such instruction is most likely going to get in the way, much as if one

tried to teach a child to walk by making him or her memorize the names of the relevant muscles, nerves,

and skeletal structures or tried to teach a baseball player how to hit by teaching him or her calculus to

describe the aerodynamics of baseballs in motion. In other words, the national standard is based on a

prescientific understanding of how grammar is acquired. This should be a national scandal. It’s as

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though we had new standards for tactics for the U.S. Navy that warned against the possibility of

sailing off the edge of the earth.

To return to the main topic, we have seen, above, that grammatical fluency and automaticity is an

essential prerequisite to reading comprehension. So, if such fluency and automaticity is not gained via

explicit instruction, how is it to be acquired? The answer is quite simple: The child has to be exposed to

an ambient linguistic environment containing increasingly complex syntactic structures so that the

language acquisition device in the brain has the material on which to work to put together a model of

the language.

So, why do some kids have, early on, a great deal of syntactic competence while other kids do not? The

answer should be obvious from the foregoing. Some were raised in syntactically rich linguistic

environments, and some were not. In 2003, Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley of the University of Kansas

published a study showing that students from low-income families were exposed, before the age of

three, to 30 million fewer words (to a lot less language) than were students from high-income families,

and that the language to which they were exposed was extremely syntactically impoverished.4

Shockingly, however, what reading comprehension people commonly do in their classrooms mirrors

what happens to kids from impoverished families and is precisely the opposite of what is required by the

language acquisition device, or LAD. Instead of providing syntactically complex materials as part of the

child’s ambient linguistic environment so that the LAD can “learn” those forms automatically and

incorporate them into the child’s working syntax, reading “professionals” intentionally use with children

what are known as levelled readers. These intentionally contain short (and thus, usually, syntactically

impoverished) sentences that will come out “at grade level” according to simplistic (and simple-minded)

“readability formulas” like Lexile and Flesch-Kincaid. The readability formulas used to “level” the texts

put before children vary in minor details, but almost all are based on sentence length and word

frequency (how frequently the words used in the text occur in some language collection known as a

corpus). Shorter sentences are, of course, statistically likely to be syntactically simple. So, as a direct

result of the method of text selection, complex syntactic forms are, de facto, banished from textbooks

and other reading materials used in reading classes. Teachers go off to education schools to take their

master’s degrees and doctorates in reading, where they learn to use such formulas to ensure that

reading is “on grade level,” and by using such formulas, they inadvertently deprive kids of precisely the

4 Hart, Betty, and Todd R. Riseley, “The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3.” American Educator, Spring 2003, 4-9.

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material that they need to be exposed to in order for their LADs to do their work. After years of

exposure to nothing but texts that have been intentionally syntactically impoverished, the students

have not developed the necessary syntactic fluency for adult reading. When confronted with real-

world texts, with their embedded relative and subordinate clauses, verbal phrases, appositives, absolute

constructions, correlative constructions, and so on, they can’t make heads or tails of what is being said

because the sentences are syntactically opaque. A sentence from the Declaration of Independence, The

Scarlet Letter, a legal document, or a technical manual might as well be written in Swahili or Linear B.

What can be done to ensure that students develop syntactic fluency? I am not suggesting that students

be given texts too difficult for them to comprehend, obviously. I am saying that they must be given texts

that are challenging syntactically—that present them with syntactic forms that they cannot, at their

stage of development, parse automatically, for it is only by this means that the innate grammar-learning

mechanism can operate to expand the student’s syntactic range. Here are a few techniques: In

conversation with students, use syntactically complex language. Present them with texts that are

routinely just above their current level of syntactic decoding ability. Have them listen to syntactically

complex texts (because syntactic decoding of spoken language outpaces syntactic decoding of written

language). Have them memorize passages containing complex syntactic constructions. Have them do

sentence combining and sentence expansion exercises. And most of all, as soon as they can begin to do

so, with difficulty, have them read real-world materials—novels and essays and nonfiction books that

have NOT been leveled but that are high interest enough to repay their effort. That such materials will

contain difficult-to-parse constructions is precisely the point. Those are the materials on which the LAD

works to acquire internal grammatical competence.

Vocabulary and World Knowledge

So, with regard to the grammatical fluency component of reading comprehension, the state of our

pedagogy is abysmal. We have things precisely backward. In the whole language days, we avoided

explicit instruction in phonics when it was precisely explicit instruction that was required by the

inadequacy of the internal language-learning mechanism with regard to the task of interpreting sound-

symbol correspondences. Today, we do explicit instruction in grammar, when the internal language-

learning mechanism is set up to learn grammar automatically, without explicit instruction.

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Are things any better with regard to the vocabulary component of comprehension? Sadly, no. The most

common way in which vocabulary instruction is approached in the United States today is by giving

students a list of “difficult” (low-frequency) words taken from a selection. So, for example, a student

might be assigned the reading of Chapter 1 of Wuthering Heights and be given this list of words from the

chapter:

Causeway

Deuce

Ejaculation

Gaudily

Laconic

Manifestation

Misanthropist

Morose

Peevish

Penetralia

Perseverance

Phlegm

Physiognomy

Prudential

Reserve

Signet

Slovenly

Soliloquise

Vis-à-vis

Students are then asked to look the words up in the dictionary or in a glossary, define them, write

sentences using them, and memorize them for a vocabulary quiz. As with grammar, the preferred

approach involves explicit instruction.

Now, the thing that should strike you, in looking at that list, taken, as it is, out of the context of the

novel, is that they might as well be words taken at random. The task facing the student is quite similar to

memorizing a random list of telephone numbers.

Other commonly used instructional techniques include teaching students to do word analysis by having

them memorize Greek and Latin prefixes, suffixes and roots and teaching them to use context clues such

as examples, synonyms, antonyms, and definitions.

Again, these instructional approaches fly in the face of the established science of language acquisition.

We now know, because linguists have studied this, that almost all of the vocabulary that an adult uses

(active vocabulary) and understands (passive vocabulary) is learned unconsciously, without explicit

instruction. Far less than one percent of adult vocabulary has been acquired by direct, explicit

instruction because direct, explicit instruction is not the means by which vocabulary is acquired. As with

grammar, there is a way in which the language-learning mechanism in the brain is set up to learn

vocabulary, and that way is not via explicit instruction. So, how do people learn vocabulary? A person

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takes a painting class at the Y. In the course of the coming weeks, the people around him or her use, in

that class, terms like gesso, chiaroscuro, stippling, filbert brush, titanium white, and so on, and, in the

absence of explicit instruction, the speaker picks the words up because people’s brains are built to

acquire vocabulary automatically in semantic networks in meaningful contexts. Vocabulary is a variety

of world knowledge, and like other world knowledge, it is added, incidentally, to the network of

knowledge that one has about a context in which it was actually used. For vocabulary to be acquired and

retained, it has to be learned in the context of other vocabulary and world-knowledge having to do with

a particular domain. Human brains are connection machines. Knowledge is easily acquired and retained

if it is connected to existing knowledge. The message for educators is clear: If you want students to

learn vocabulary, skip the explicit vocabulary instruction and concentrate, instead, on extended

exposure to knowledge in particular domains and enable the students to acquire, in context, the

vocabulary native to that domain. The focus has to be on the knowledge domain—on turtles or Egypt

or 19th-century Romanticism or whatever—and the vocabulary has to be learned incidentally and in

batches of semantically related terms because that is how vocabulary is actually learned. It’s how the

brain is set up to learn new words. As it stands now, students are subjected to many, many thousands

of hours of explicit instruction in random vocabulary items, with the result that far less than one percent

of the vocabulary that they actually learn was acquired by this means. The opportunity cost of this

heedless approach is staggering.

My teachers should have ridden with Jesse James

For all the time they stole from me.

--Richard Brautigan

With regard to the vocabulary from Wuthering Heights, teachers are well advised to read with the kids

and stop, from time to time, to clarify the meaning of a word in its immediate context but to skip the list

and its attendant fruitless pedagogical activities.

Kairos and World Knowledge

Texts exist in context. If someone says, “We need to tie up the loose ends here,” it makes a difference

whether the speaker is a macramé instructor or Tony Soprano. Is the statement about pieces of string or

about a mob hit? The context matters. Comprehending the sentence—understanding what it means—

depends crucially on the context in which it is uttered. The same is true of almost all language.

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The ancient Greeks used the term kairos to refer to a speaker’s sensitivity to his or her audience, to the

occasion, and to the immediate context of the utterance. I’ll be using it, here, in a slightly expanded

sense to refer to all the extra-textual stuff that goes into understanding a text. For years, reading

comprehension teachers have been told to begin the reading of a text by “activating their student’s

prior knowledge.” Millions of teachers dutifully learned this “strategy” and attempted to apply it in their

classrooms even though a moment’s reflection would have revealed it to be completely absurd. If a

student already has the relevant background knowledge to understand a text, then it will not need to be

“activated.” It will simply be there. And if the student does NOT have the relevant background

knowledge, no amount of having students tell what they already know will supply it. That said, and here

we have yet another example of educators half hearing what scientists have been saying, cognitive

scientists like Daniel Willingham of the University of Virginia and the education theorist E.D. Hirsch, Jr.,

have shown beyond any reasonable doubt that background knowledge—what the writer assumes that

the reader already knows—is one of the great keys to reading comprehension. Let’s consider an

example. My students’ eleventh-grade literature textbook contains a passage about how Arthur Miller

wrote The Crucible in reaction to the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. The passage mentions people

being hauled before the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations and being accused of being

Communists. It goes on to say that Miller was concerned by the hysteria and guilt-by-association

attendant to these hearings and wrote the play to show how the same sort of thing occurred during the

Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Now, if the students reading that do not know the background—what a

Communist is; that the United States is a Capitalist country; that Communism and Capitalism are

antagonistic; that in the 1950s, the United States was involved in a Cold War with the Communist Soviet

Union; that the Soviet Union had vowed to bring down the American system; that certain Senators and

Congressmen in the 1950s were concerned about Communist infiltration of the media, the government,

and the armed services; what a subcommittee is; what a hearing is; and that the Subcommittee on

Investigations attempted to identify Communist sympathizers, then the passage in the text will be

meaningless. In short, comprehension depends critically on world knowledge. Without the relevant

background knowledge, comprehension cannot occur. A student cannot read Milton or Dante with

comprehension if he or she is ignorant of the Bible and won’t comprehend the title of George Bernard

Shaw’s play about Professor Higgins and Liza if he or she is ignorant of the Greek myth in which

Pygmalion falls in love with a statue. Consider this opaque text from Dylan Thomas:

The twelve triangles of the cherub wind

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This impenetrable text becomes crystal clear when one realizes that Thomas is referring to old maps

that represented the winds as cherubs whose breath—the winds—inscribed triangles across the maps.

One can’t begin to understand Plato’s allegory of the cave without understanding that he was highly

influenced by Greek mathematics, recognized that perfect forms (like a point or a perfect triangle) did

not exist in the world but did exist in the mind, used a single word (psyche) for both mind and spirit, and

thus thought of anything perfect (and thus, he thought, good) as existing in a separate, spiritual plane

that could be accessed through mental/spiritual activity. One has to have a lot of information about the

background—the concepts available to Plato and what he was concerned with—to make any sense at all

of his bizarre little story. Domains of knowledge, from auto mechanics to the growing of orchids to

theodicy and dirigible driving all have their associated vocabulary—not just jargon but words and

phrases that appear with particular frequency and particular meaning within them. And knowledge of

this vocabulary is not a matter of possession of a bunch of definitions taken in the abstract but, rather,

possession of an understanding of how those words and phrases are used and in what contexts within

the relevant domain. Life coaches and physicists use the word potential in related but distinct ways and

about different objects. Understanding what is meant by the word, in a text, requires, in addition to

knowledge of its definition, knowledge of how it is used in the subset of the world that is the knowledge

domain of the text. Furthermore, the ability to use a term actively involves mastering not only its

definition but also its inflected and derivative forms, something that is learned not through explicit, rote

study but through use in context. A student hasn’t really learned the word imply unless he or she can

properly use such inflected forms as implying, implied, and implies as well as such derivative forms as

implication, and one learns those forms, really learns them, only through repeated use in a context.

Simply memorizing the definition for a test is a recipe for forgetting.

A Summary of the Prerequisites for Reading Comprehension

Decoding ability—phonics and grammatical fluency—are, of course, prerequisites to comprehension.

They must be mastered before comprehension is possible. The same is true of domain-specific world

knowledge—knowledge about Communists, the Bible, Greek myths, old maps, geometrical forms, or

whatever it is that the author is taking for granted that the reader knows, including the vocabulary used

in that context, or domain. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., has written eloquently and persuasively on precisely this

subject in numerous works, including The Schools We Need and The Knowledge Deficit. The reader is

referred to those works for further information. Suffice it to say that the teacher must ensure that

students have the relevant background knowledge, including domain-specific vocabulary, to understand

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what they are being asked to read and that instruction should be focused on extended time spent in

particular knowledge domains so that students can build the bodies of knowledge that they need for

comprehending texts in the future. New knowledge needs a hook to hang on. That hook is other

knowledge in the relevant knowledge domain.

That ought to be obvious. However, today, reading instruction has devolved into isolated practice of

“comprehension strategies” using short texts taken absolutely at random—a snippet of text here on

invasive species, a snippet of text there on Harriet Tubman. But brains are built to acquire knowledge in

connected networks, and the hundreds of thousands of hours spent doing this practice of strategies

applied to random, isolated texts is time completely wasted. More about that later.

So, knowledge is essential to comprehension. But there are other extra-textual matters—other parts of

the overall kairos of the text—that are also essential. Among these are genre and a whole raft of

conventions of usage—idioms, transitional devices and turns, figures of speech, rhetorical techniques,

manuscript formatting, and so on. So, for example, comprehending a text by Sir Phillip Sidney or one of

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence may require knowledge of the conventions of the genre of pastoral—

that lambs represent innocence, that shepherds are uncorrupted by city life, that spring represents

youth and rebirth, and so on. The semantic component of language is highly conventional.

Understanding a poem often requires familiarity with conventional symbol systems like that which

relates the cycles of the seasons to the life cycle (spring/youth, summer/maturity, autumn/age,

winter/death). One has to know the convention, or one is lost.

Given all this, one would expect that reading comprehension instructors were devoting their time to a)

ensuring that students have automaticity in phonetic and grammatical decoding, building vocabulary

and world knowledge through extended work in critical knowledge domains, and acquainting students

with the conventions of various genres and the primary literary and rhetorical conventions. After all,

that’s what reading comprehension requires. But if you made such an assumption, you would be wrong.

What reading comprehension teachers are doing, instead, is spending their time teaching “reading

strategies.”

The Devolution of Reading Comprehension Instruction and Assessment

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Back in 1984, Palinscar and Brown wrote a highly influential paper about something they called

“reciprocal learning.”5 They suggested, in that paper, that teachers conducting reading circles encourage

dialogue about texts by having students do prediction, ask questions, clarify the text, and summarize.

Excellent advice. But this little paper had an enormously detrimental unintended effect on the

professional education community. All groups are naturally protective of their own turf. The paper by

Palinscar and Brown had handed the professional education community a definition of their turf: You

see, we do, after all, have a unique, respectable, scientific field of our own that justifies our existence—

we are the keepers of “strategies” for learning. The reading community, in particular, embraced this

notion wholeheartedly. Reading comprehension instruction became MOSTLY about teaching reading

strategies, and an industry for identifying reading strategies and teaching those emerged. The vast,

complex field of reading comprehension was narrowed to a few precepts: teach kids

to identify the main idea and supporting details,

to identify sequences,

to identify cause and effect relationships,

to make predictions,

to make inferences,

to use context clues,

to identify text elements.

In the real world, outside school, a strategy is a broad approach to accomplishing a goal. In EdSpeak,

weirdly, a strategy is any particular thing, whatsoever, that one might do to advance toward a goal

(what in the real world would be called a tactic). It’s typical of people in education to use words

imprecisely, like this—to borrow a term and then use it improperly. Consider the term benchmark. In

the real world, a benchmark is a standard reflecting the highest performance in a given industry. So, for

example, the highest read-write time for a disc drive achieved by any manufacturer is a benchmark, or

goal, for other disc drive manufacturers to meet. In education, a benchmark is any sort of interim

evaluation. Educators confused the goal (the benchmark) with the method of evaluating achievement of

5 Palincsar, A. S., and A.L Brown. “Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension-Fostering and Comprehension-Monitoring Activities. Cognition and Instruction (1984). 1:2, 117-175.

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the goal. Education schools are bastions of such sloppy thinking—confusion of means and ends,

misapplication of concepts, and so on.

Throughout American K-12 education, in the late 1980s, we started seeing curriculum materials

organized around teaching some variant of the list of “reading comprehension strategies” given above.

Where before a student might do a lesson on reading Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy

Evening,” he or she would now do a lesson on Making Predictions, and any random snippet of text that

contained some examples of predictions, as long as it was “on grade level,” would be a worthy object of

study.

One problem with working at such a high level of abstraction—of having our lessons be about, say,

“making inferences,” is that the abstraction reifies, it hypostasizes. It combines apples and shoelaces

and football teams under a single term and creates a false belief that some particular thing—not an

enormous range of disparate phenomena—is referred to by the abstraction. In the years after Palinscar

and Brown’s paper, educational publishers produced hundreds of thousands of lessons on “Making

Inferences,” and one can look through all of them, in vain, for any sign of awareness on the part of the

lessons’ creators that inference is enormously varied and that “making proper inferences” involves an

enormous amount of learning that is specific to inferences of different kinds. There are, in fact, whole

sciences devoted to the various types of inference—deduction, induction, and abduction—and whole

sciences devoted to specific problems within each. The question of how to “make an inference” is

extraordinarily complex, and a great deal human attention has been given to it over the centuries, and a

quick glance at any of the hundreds of thousands of Making Inferences lessons in our textbooks and in

papers about reading strategies by education professors will reveal that almost nothing of what is

actually known about this subject has found its way into our instruction. If professional educators were

really interested in teaching their students how to “make inferences,” then they would, themselves,

take the trouble to learn some propositional and predicate logic so that they would understand what

deductive inference is about. They would have taken the trouble to learn some basic probability and

techniques for hypothesis testing so that they would understand the tools of inductive and abductive

inference. But they haven’t done this because it’s difficult, and so, when they write their papers and

create their lessons about “making inferences,” they are doing this in blissful ignorance of what making

inferences really means and, importantly, of the key concepts that would be useful for students to know

about making inferences that are reasonable. This is but one example of how, over the past few

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decades, a façade, a veneer of scientific respectability has been erected in the field of “English language

arts” that has precious little real value.

I bring up the issue of instruction in making inferences in order to make a more general point—the

professional education establishment, and especially that part of it that concerns itself with English

language arts and reading instruction, has retreated into dealing in poorly conceived generalization and

abstraction. Reading comprehension instruction, in particular, has DEVOLVED into the teaching of

reading strategies, and those strategies are not much more than puffery and vagueness. To borrow

Gertrude Stein’s phrase, is no there there. No kid walks away from his or her Making Inferences lesson

with any substantive learning, with any world knowledge or concept or set of procedures that can

actually be applied in order to determine what kind of inference a particular one is and whether that

inference is reasonable. A kid does not learn, for example, that some approaches to making inductive

inferences include looking at historical frequency, analyzing propensities, making systematic

observations and tallies, calculating the probabilities, conducting a A/B split survey, holding a focus

group, and performing a Gedankenexperiment or an actual experiment involving a control group and an

experimental group. Why? Because one has to learn and teach a lot of complex material in order to do

these things at all, and professional education folks have decided, oddly, that they can teach making

inferences without, themselves, learning about what kinds of inferences there are, how one can make

them rationally, and how one evaluates the various kinds.

Though reading comprehension instruction has now almost completely devolved into the

teaching of “reading comprehension strategies,” those strategies do not, themselves, hold up to

close inspection. They all exemplify a fundamental kind of error that philosophers call a

“category error”–a mistaken belief that one kind of thing is like and so belongs in the same

category as some completely different kind of thing. Reading comprehension “specialists” now

speak of “learning comprehension strategies,” as though recognizing the main idea, making

inferences, and so on, were discrete, monolithic, invariant skills that one can learn, akin to

learning how to sew on a button or learning how to carry a number when adding, but the

“reading comprehension strategies” are nothing like that. Being able to identify the main idea of

a given piece of prose, poetry, or drama is NOT a general, universally applicable procedural skill

like being able to carry out the standard algorithm for multiplying multi-digit numbers, and

placing them into the same category (“skill”) is an example of the logical fallacy known as a

category error.

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When you see a list of the skills to be tested for math and the skills to be tested in ELA–that is,

when you look at a list of “standards”–it’s important that you understand that there are very, very

different KINDS of thing on those lists, the one for math and the one for English. These are not only as

different as are apples and oranges, they are as different as an apple is from a hope for the future or the

pattern of freckles on Socrates’s forehead or the square root of negative one. They are different sorts of

thing ALTOGETHER because the math skills are discrete, monolithic, and invariant, and those “reading

strategies” are not.

Let me illustrate the point about “the main idea.”

What is the main idea of the following?

The ready to hand is encountered within the world. The Being of this entity, readiness to hand,

thus stands in some ontological relationship toward the world and toward worldhood. In

anything ready-to-hand, the world is always ‘there.’ Whenever we encounter anything, the

world has already been previously discovered, though not thematically.6

Now, note that this passage would have a pretty low Lexile level. It doesn’t contain a lot of difficult

(long, complicated, low-frequency) words, and the difficult words (ontological, ready-to-hand,

thematically) can be explained. It doesn’t contain long or syntactically complicated sentences. But the

chances are good that unless you are familiar with continental philosophy, you will have NO CLUE

WHATSOEVER what this passage is saying. In order for you to understand the main idea of this passage,

you would need, at a minimum, an introduction to the philosophical problems that Heidegger is

addressing in the passage. In other words, you would have to have a lot of world knowledge about

continental philosophy. Otherwise, the passage will be impenetrable to you. No general “finding-the-

main-idea skill” will help you to make sense of the passage.

Now, what is the main idea of the following?

One of the limits of reality

Presents itself in Oley when they hay,

Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is

6 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper, 2008. P. 114.

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A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.

There the distant fails the clairvoyant eye.

Things stop in that direction and since they stop

The direction stops and we accept what is

As good. The utmost must be good and is

And is our fortune and honey hived in the trees

And mingling of colors at a festival.7

Again, the language is not that difficult. One can easily define the less frequent words–enigmas, serene,

clairvoyant, and utmost. But that’s not going to help you figure out what the “main idea” here is. For

that, the royal road is an introduction to the kinds of concerns that Wallace Stevens took up in his

poetry. If you know from his other work that Stevens wrote, time and time again, about the failure of

our abstractions to account for the concrete facts of the world and about our tendency to live in our

abstractions rather than in the real world, if you know that Stevens was distrustful of abstractions of all

kinds—religious, political, philosophical, and so on, then the passage will make sense to you. If you

don’t, well, good luck.

Now, notice that what is involved in figuring out the main idea of each of these passages is entirely

different. Oh, sure, there are similarities between the passages. Both are passages in English. Both deal

with a philosophical idea. Actually, they both deal with the same philosophical idea. But in the one case,

to grasp the main idea, you have to be familiar with a lot of Continental philosophy and with the kinds of

problems that such philosophy addresses. In the other, you need to be able to recognize that Stevens is

revisiting what is, for him, a recurring theme.

This is the key point: there is no one procedure–no one finding the main idea procedure–that I can

teach you that will enable to you to determine what each passage, and any other passage taken at

random from a piece of writing, means.

In other words, no instruction in some general finding-the-main-idea skill is going to help you, usually, to

find the main idea. There’s a reason for that: THERE IS NO “general finding the main idea skill.” That

7 Stevens, Wallace. “Credences of Summer,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1982, P. 372.

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such a thing exists is an UTTER FICTION. The “general finding-the-main-idea skill” is as fictional as one

of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fairies.

Finding the main idea is context dependent in a way that adding multi-digit numbers isn’t. It makes no

difference whether you are adding 462 and 23 or 1842 and 748, you are going to follow the same

procedure and draw upon the same class of facts. Not so with “finding the main idea.” There is no

magical procedure for main idea finding that applies to all texts and scoots around the necessity of

engaging with a particular text—decoding it, parsing it, applying world knowledge to understanding it,

recognizing its context and conventions, and then generalizing about it or recognizing that some

statement within it encapsulates that idea. Sure, occasionally one will encounter, in the real world, a

puerile piece of writing of the five-paragraph theme variety that states its main idea in an introduction

or conclusion. One can teach students, for a few limited types of texts, to do that. But most texts in the

real world contain no such idea readily identifiable using a particular procedure. Hedda Gabler contains

no thesis statement. Neither does the Gettysburg Address or The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of

Mental Disorders. Determining what the main idea of each text is a tall order and requires, for each, a

unique procedure. Schooling in reading comprehension should teach kids to make sense of real-world

writing, and writing in the real world does not take the form of five-paragraph themes with the main

idea neatly tucked in at the conclusion of the introductory paragraph. And as long as we continue

cooking up pieces of fake writing for use in exercises on finding the main idea in those, we are

perpetuating a myth.

And, of course, attempting to test for possession of this mythical general finding-the-main-idea faculty

that is being magically transmitted to students via “reading comprehension instruction” is like requiring

people to bag and bring home any other sort of mythical entity–a unicorn, Pegasus, or the golden apples

from the tree at the edge of the world.

Now, how is it that people have come to believe that there is exists a “general finding-the-main-idea

skill”? Well, they have committed a category error. They’ve made the mistake of thinking that figuring

out what’s happening in a piece of poetry or prose is a discrete, specific, universally applicable general

skill like the ability to carry out the algorithm for adding multi-digit numbers.

It’s not.

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And, of course, since there exists no “general finding-the-main-idea skill,” there can exist no valid test of

general finding-the-main-idea skill. The tests, like the curricula, have to be cooked to contain passages

that work with the formula that the reading comprehension teachers teach—look for the thesis

statement in the introduction and in the conclusion or the topic sentence in the paragraph. For brevity,

let’s look at just the latter.

In 1866, Alexander Bain published his English Composition and Rhetoric: a Manual,8 the great

grandfather of the writing textbooks of today. It was Bain who first characterized the paragraph as

school texts have ever since, as a group of sentences related to or supporting a single topic sentence

and characterized by unity and coherence. Here we have a classic categorical definition. The set of

paragraphs has these essential, or defining, characteristics:

Possession of a topic sentence

Possession of a number of sentences related to or supporting the topic sentence

Unity

Coherence

Building on this definition, a school text might provide the following heuristic for writing a paragraph:

“State a general idea. Then back it up with specific details (or examples or instances). Make sure not

to include any unrelated ideas, and make sure to make the connections among your ideas clear by

using transitions.”

Of course, individual paragraphs in the real world simply do not fit the standard textbook definition,

though that definition has been repeated with only minor variation ever since Bain. Most pieces of

writing and, ipso facto, most paragraphs, are narrative, and rarely does a narrative paragraph have a

topic sentence. Narrative paragraphs are typically just one darned thing after another. Two of the

most common types of paragraphs, those that make up newspaper articles and those that present

dialogue in stories, typically contain only one or two sentences, and a paragraph in dialogue can be as

short as a grunt or an exhalation. And, of course, it makes little sense to speak of a sentence or

fragment as being unified or coherent in the senses in which those terms are usually used when

describing paragraphs. Of all the types of writing that exist, only nonfiction academic prose contains

8 Bain, Alexander. English Composition and Rhetoric: A Manual. New York: Appleton, 1866.

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paragraphs that frequently contain topic sentences, and in such prose, only about half the paragraphs

do.9

The fact is that the traditional schoolroom definition of a paragraph describes the fairly rare case in

which a single general main idea is illustrated by specifics. Of course, few paragraphs in the real

world work that way. Throw a dart at a page in Harper’s magazine. You will not hit a Bain-style

paragraph. There are many, many other ways to put several sentences together sensibly. The

narrative way is the simplest: Present one darned thing after another. But one can also write quite an

effective paragraph that, for example, consists of a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis; such a

paragraph comes to a conclusion but has no overall main idea in any reasonable sense of the term

“main idea.” Many well-crafted nonnarrative paragraphs depart radically from the schoolbook model,

having no overall, paragraph-level organizational scheme but, rather, only a part-by-part organization in

which each sentence is connected to the one before it and to the one after it in any of a myriad ways.

In such cases, the writer often begins a new paragraph only because he or she has run out one head

of steam. Whew! The study of these part-by-part connections that hold ideas together is sometimes

referred to as discourse analysis.

Because of the variety of that exists in paragraphs in real-world writing, no general finding-the-main-idea

skill for paragraphs exists. The same is true for other kinds of writing—for poems, essays, memoirs, oral

histories, plays, technical manuals, nonfiction books, sermons, and so on. Writing is too various, and the

reading comprehension strategy is far, far too specific, akin to determining whether a given entity is a

human being by asking if his or her name is Bob.

Teachers would be disabused of their notion that paragraphs typically contain topic sentences

that state “the main idea” if they actually studied paragraphs in the wild, as linguists sometimes

do.

That there exists no general, universally or even often applicable finding-the-main-idea skill does

not mean, of course, that there don’t exist some passages, in written works, that have main ideas

and some subset of those in which the main ideas are stated explicitly. But it does mean that

there is no essential characteristic that all main ideas or passages or paragraphs that have main ideas

9 See McCarthy, et al. “Identifying Topic Sentencehood. Behavior Research and Methods. 40: 647-664 and Popken, R. I. A Study of Topic Sentence Use in Academic Writing. Written Communication 4: 209-228.

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have and that there is no general ability to find main ideas, the possession of which can be tested for

reliably across all texts at grade level. One has to be an educator, living in a world of cooked, formulaic,

schoolroom writing, to believe in such a mythical entity.

Again, treating basic mathematics and ELA as though they were the same sort of thing, with skills that

can be similarly enumerated and tested, is a fundamental mistake of the kind that philosophers call a

category error. Worse yet, it’s a fundamental category error on which our lists of standards, our

summative standardized tests, and our district-level interim standardized tests in ELA are all based!

Correcting this error would mean completely redoing what we are doing in a way that operationalizes

our very vague, ill-formulated notions like “finding the mean idea” or “making inferences/drawing

conclusions.” But operationalizing them would be impossible because no general set of operations can

be delineated.

But that’s not the biggest problem with the reading comprehension strategies approach to teaching

reading. As we saw above, comprehending a text requires being able to decode its symbols (phonics);

being able, automatically and fluently, to parse its syntax; having knowledge of the vocabulary in the

text and of the referents and uses of that vocabulary in specific, real-world knowledge domains; having

the requisite background knowledge assumed by the author; and being familiar with the broad range of

extra-textual, contextual determinants of meaning that include conventions of genre, particular

interests and concerns that the author had, the occasion and audience to which the text responds, and

idiomatic, figurative, and rhetorical usages. Ignoring all these in order to teach “reading comprehension

strategies,” day in and day out, is like teaching a class in sailing that concentrates, entirely, on methods

for polishing the bright work and folding the sails. The important stuff isn’t even dealt with.

The current standards-and-testing regime has acerbated this problem, for the new standards consist

almost entirely of vaguely conceived abstractions like the so-called “reading strategies.” Our students

spend their days doing test practice questions based on isolated, random snippets of text and applying

vaguely conceived strategies to answer those questions, and the real determinants of reading

comprehension are not addressed. The opportunity cost of all this is, of course, quite high—our students

fail to learn to read well because the actual determinants of comprehension have not, in their

education, been addressed. There is no magic bullet—no list of strategies and standards to be

mastered via practice exercises—that will substitute for learning to decode; internalizing a robust,

sophisticated grammar; acquiring specific domain knowledge; becoming familiar with text

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conventions; and reading a lot of whole texts—the actual determinants of the ability to comprehend

what one reads.

What Reading Comprehension Instruction and Astrology Have in Common

Permit me another analogy. Before there was science, there was magic. Astrology preceded astronomy.

The problem with astrology, of course, is that it had no causal mechanism. It was absolutely

prescientific. Current approaches to reading comprehension instruction are just like that. Both are

performed in ignorance of what science teaches us about causal mechanisms, in the one case with

regard to the stars and to determinants of human personality and fortunes, in the other with regard to

how children acquire the ability to comprehend texts. We now have actual sciences dealing with human

personality and fortunes—psychology and economics. We also have actual sciences dealing with how

people learn to comprehend language—linguistics and cognitive science. These last two sciences have

taught us a lot about how kids actually learn to make sense of language, and one day, perhaps, our

reading teachers, curriculum designers, test designers, and policy makers will learn some of what

science has taught us, in the past sixty years, about language. Until then, we shall be in the Dark Ages

and might as well replace our classwork—all those practice exercises on reading comprehension skills--

with drawing sigils and muttering magical incantations.