As a teacher and a writer, I am of course concerned about the state of readership in our country. Reading has great value in its impact on persons – and citizens – throughout life. Thus I was interested in WaPo’s recent piece “Why are kids are not good readers” (no paywall). It was written by a developmental psychologist who founded a teaching program at Williams College and a linguist who teaches cognition and education at Harvard. It examined the drop-off in reading proficiency as a student advances through education.
I liked how they looked both at fiction/poetry and non-fiction reading. On the fiction side, the authors note:
When reading fiction or poetry, deep comprehension involves using subtle cues in the text to make inferences about the characters’ underlying emotions. It requires understanding the genre and connecting the material to the era in which the writer lived. It also involves identifying common themes between texts.
This highlights why reading is so important for developing empathetic human beings. Moreover, I once heard a speaker at a conference reference some study that linked kindergarteners’ ability to form theory of mind (i.e. putting yourself in others’ shoes, specifically by describing the POV of various characters in a simple story) with future success in math of all things! (A quick search turned up this possible source for the speaker). The kind of intelligence developed in fiction reading should not be underestimated.
On the non-fiction side, they discuss the importance of knowledge acquisition to reading comprehension and note, as an example,
When reading in the sciences, deep comprehension consists of calling up relevant background knowledge and integrating it with information from the text.
I have often felt the current pedagogical tension between skills building and knowledge acquisition. So often one hears that you can look up anything on Google, so why do you need to know it. As this article’s authors note, having something in your mind for the new information and ideas to connect to and integrate with makes comprehension and retention more effective.
Indeed, so much of our ability to judge things, to make connections, to build and synthesize, to create relies on what’s already in our brains, not what we can search for out on the web. We might not even know what we need to look for. Nor recognize potential connections.
Dare I say look at the Barbie movie? The choice of stylish pump vs. Birkenstock can only be full appreciated if you know The Matrix. Or the opening scene if you know Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sure, you can look up easter-eggs on the internet afterwards, but movies, literature – and indeed non-fiction – is so much richer when you recognize and make connections from your own foundational knowledge.
I’m not sure I have a point here. I do at times wonder if we are headed towards an aliterate society. I’ll admit that since the pandemic, I more frequently myself listening to audiobooks (rather than reading). And I have noted that on-line newspapers more and more offer the option to listen to their stories (I realize they’re trying to compete with podcasts and the like). So it was with a twinge of irony that I noted at the top of a story about how the next generation are not good readers this button (highlighted in yellow):
Ramblings 