English language arts activities that offer the smallest payout,” noting that “strategy instruction may have an upper limit, yet building background knowledge does not.” We can conclude, then, that spending too much time on these strategies simply takes time away from just letting students read and develop their personal schema of background knowledge to build on.
We are not saying that instruction on specific skills or strategies has no impact. It does; it’s just that your return on time investment diminishes quickly. According to reading researchers Anne Castles, Kathleen Rastle, and Kate Nation (2018), “The benefits of strategy instruction appear to emerge after relatively little instruction: There is little evidence that longer or more intensive strategy interventions lead to greater improvements in reading comprehension” (p. 35). That’s where the time becomes available for significantly more student reading. Similarly, Hirsch (2018) notes:
Source: © Mark Anderson, www.andertoons.com. Used with permission.
Students do show an initial positive effect from practicing finding the main idea. But their progress quickly reaches a limit and then halts. We know this from various meta-studies as well as from the stagnant NAEP data. Drills in formal comprehension skills have not raised mature reading scores; rather, they have taken up a lot of class time that could have been devoted to knowledge building. (p. 20)
The ability to find a main idea or make an inference is a manifestation or byproduct of comprehension. Students do not read well because we have taught them the hundreds of skills reflected in the standards. They are able to perform those skills because we have taught them to read well by focusing on the big three.
Now armed with the big three elements as a distillation of comprehension, we teachers best know where to focus. Decoding, vocabulary, and knowledge are truly the essence of comprehension, not all the individual reading comprehension skills and strategies that occupy so much of our time.
The Journey Ahead
Now that we have a better understanding of what comprehension is, we can begin to fully explore how to develop it. We need to consider how teachers can best promote the process of literacy acquisition, but our findings will not merely be about what teachers must do. If we are going to make substantive changes in student performance, we must also come to understand how students not only can but must become self-teachers in the process. There is work they must do, and we must create the conditions for that to happen.
First of all, let’s mention why we’ve chosen to title the book Literacy Reframed. Our ambition with Literacy Reframed is to reframe K–12 teachers’ approach to literacy, moving from a skill-based frame to a more holistic and knowledge-centric one. A knowledge-centric approach to reading values the actual knowledge one receives from reading. Knowledge learned is the ultimate takeaway from the literacy experience. We intentionally use the word reframe because we are putting a brand-new frame on the existing picture of literacy. It is about changing perspectives, or educators’ view of the endgame of reading. Teachers can then use this reframed vision of literacy to craft enduring learning for aspiring readers.
In visual arts, particularly cinematography, framing is the presentation of visual elements in an image, especially the placement of the subject in relation to other objects. When we frame a scene in a different way, the new frame doesn’t change the contents of the picture, but it changes the focus of the person viewing the picture. Framing can make an image more aesthetically pleasing and keep the viewer’s focus on the framed scene. One example from the visual arts is the framing technique repoussoir, or the use of an object near the edge of a composition that directs attention into the scene. In French, repoussoir means “pushing back” (“Repoussoir,” n.d.); this book pushes teachers’ attention away from the distractions that have plagued them and back to what matters. Basically, our aim is to give teachers a sense of the value of knowledge and meaning instead of letting them rely so heavily on students’ skillfulness as readers. The painting “The Art of Painting” (https://bit.ly/3ddHped) by Johannes Vermeer (1666–1668) demonstrates repoussoir; a curtain in the foreground gives the audience only a partial view into an artist’s studio, but frames that view so that viewers see the studio in a certain way.
By the way, if you stumbled upon the word repoussoir and did not know what it means, you would probably try to figure it out by sounding it out in your head, relying on what you learned about phonics in the first grade. You would also probably try to define it considering the context of how it was used. If you were completely unfamiliar with the word, you would naturally look up the definition in the dictionary (or simply google it). Regardless, the point is that you would use techniques you learned in elementary school to help you develop your vocabulary. You would consider the context in which the word was used, look up the word, and consider synonyms you might know, using the lifelong skill of vocabulary building while continually expanding your personal word bank. And finally, you would look for examples of the word in the real world to build a deeper understanding or knowledge base about the visual arts. It seems pertinent to mention that the ability to conduct this kind of search for context clues develops over time when one has spent a lot of time just reading. Rich, relevant reading pays dividends with advancing literacy. This idea exemplifies not the overskillification of reading but the totality of reading comprehension, literacy acquisition, and the big three elements under scrutiny.
In illuminating a dynamic new path forward that reframes our perspective on literacy, Literacy Reframed devotes a chapter to each of the big three elements of reading comprehension. Chapter 1 covers decoding and discusses the sound of literacy and phonics. The sound of language awakens students’ sensitivities from an early age. In chapter 2, we move on to vocabulary, concentrating on the look of literacy. The look of language includes the images of letters, of words with tall letters and letters that hang down, of a string of words called a phrase, sentence, or question, and even of the graphic configurations of paragraphs, dialogue, and poetry on the page or screen. Words seem like mere squiggles to students at first but ultimately become familiar and identifiable to the youngest readers. The element of knowledge appears in chapter 3, which focuses on the knowingness of literacy—that is, background knowledge. The knowingness of language involves students’ brains making sense of the sound and sight of language to continually build their mental map of background knowledge.
Finally, we have devoted chapter 4 to digital reading. In this age of technological innovation, digital reading takes its rightful place in the Literacy Reframed landscape. We felt it was important to include a chapter on this important topic because the model of paper-and-pencil reading and writing is now juxtaposed with digital devices of every size and shape in our learning environments. We aim to distill the essence of digital reading concerns within the frame of the school, classroom, and students. Digital literacy combines the sound, look, and knowingness of literacy in unique ways, and we feel it’s essential for teachers to acknowledge and use these similarities and differences as they work toward the overall goal of educating literate young people and making them ready to enter the wide, wide world of known and unknown challenges.
In each chapter, we begin with a brief introduction and an overview of the essential research. Then we transition to ideas for school implementation and classroom applications of a knowledge-centric curriculum in a variety of grade levels and subjects. We close each chapter with a list of team discussion questions and essential resources that readers can use to extend their learning. For schools that function as professional learning
