Comprehending Comprehension: Episode 2

Topic: Building Awareness and Action Around Comprehension: A Conversation with State Leaders Guests: Marie Catherine Ireland and Perry Flynn This time around we talked with state leaders about building awareness and action around comprehension. Marie Ireland works for the Virginia Department of Education and Perry Flynn is the consultant to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction in the Area of Speech-Language Pathology and is a professor in the Department of Communication Disorders at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. We first asked our guests (and our audience) why they thought that 60%-80% of students across the U.S. are not meeting grade-level expectations. Here are some points our guests made: 1. States and school districts have autonomy and choose to implement reading programs as they deem appropriate. 2. The reading programs that the states have adopted have not truly focused on all aspects of the National Reading Panel recommendations (even when those programs have advertised that they do). 3. North Carolina and Virginia are moving forward with teacher training in the LETRS program. But this implementation does take a long time, and is heavily focused on decoding. 4. The instruction has just been a one-size-fits-all, and RTI has only helped to a degree. 5. Teacher attention has been on many areas, not just reading. 6. Education is political. When there are elections, there are often new people who want to shake things up and change things. This does not promote steady growth and focus. We then shifted to topic to the “science of reading.” Trina and Doug have noted that a lot of science of reading advocates suggest that decoding is the primary problem for the reading crisis, especially for young K-3 students. We wondered if our guests thought this was accurate? 1. Marie indicated that in VA they have had a wonderful collaboration with researchers. They have developed and used PALS for years. Yet even though this has been a major focus, VA still has the same problems as the rest of the country. Decoding is certainly not the only issue. Poverty, dialect, culture, narratives, language in general are factors. 2. Perry’s answer? Decoding is the pop culture face of literacy problems, and that is why the NC state superintendent has latched on to it. But in the exceptional children department in NC more of the Scarborough rope has been embraced. 3. Doug’s answer? I don’t believe that decoding is what science of reading advocates only want to focus on, but it has to be close to 90% of the questions and 90% of the posts on the science of reading social media that are about decoding. I think they don’t know how to focus on comprehension. I think they know how to focus on the constrained skill of decoding. But language is not nearly as well understood as the decoding side. 4. Trina’s answer? The children who are failing the most at reading in the U.S. are culturally and linguistically diverse. If it were truly a decoding problem, we would see more balanced figures. But because there is a disproportionate number of CLD students doing poorly, it is obviously not decoding, which is learned without disproportionate difficulty across race and ethnicity. Kiefer and Vuckovic (2012) did a study with low income, language minority students and English-language dominant students and they found that among all the students who had comprehension problems 80% had weaknesses in linguistic comprehension only – no decoding problems. Only 15% of the children with comprehension problems had difficulty with both language and decoding. 5. Marie Ireland: We have to focus on the culture of education. At risk schools have the least prepared teachers, more people who are working under provisional licenses, more substitutes, and educators with less knowledge of reading and less knowledge of how to teach vocabulary and language. Other things are going on and they need to be accounted for. This is a bigger issue than just focusing on phonics and not comprehension. 6. Perry Flynn agrees: Equity/equality issues are important. Many kids who come from low SES backgrounds, for example, had no connectivity during the COVID school year. This lack of access is another part of the problem that is going to keep students behind. 7. Marie Ireland: the focus on language is a challenge. Teachers think they know language. They look at capitalization, punctuation, complete sentences. They don’t focus on story grammar. They think students are doing well because they aren’t looking at the right language features.