Follow-up and 2 articles

Does reading disconnected words out of context matter?

Thanks to those who attended, viewed, and/or commented on the video chat analyzing a tutoring episode with a young reader (← the link in case you missed and now regret it).

Participants were Andy Johnson (professor of literacy at Minnesota State University in Mankato), Harriett Janetos and Marnie Ginsberg (Substack regulars), and me. The video showed Marnie working with a young reader reading a text.

As promised, I’m including links to two articles following up on one of the issues that came up:

Is reading a list of words out of context predictive of or correlated to reading achievement later on?

Andy said “unequivocally, no.”

So let’s bring on some research. (Email me if you can’t access the articles, but trigger warning: They are not easy reads.)

The first study shows that how well students read from a list of words in grade 1 predicted their reading comprehension in grade 2. Students’ reading comprehension in grade 2 then predicted their reading comprehension in grade 3 to a very high degree. Each year thereafter, students’ reading comprehension in one grade predicted their reading comprehension in the next, again to a very high degree.

Here’s the conclusion the researchers reached:

… variation in reading comprehension can be largely explained by variables at the word level. [NOTE from me: The other variables that explained reading comprehension were vocabulary and listening comprehension.] The efficient decoding of word forms constitutes a necessary condition for reading comprehension. In fact, a child’s word identification skill appears to set the limits on reading comprehension during the early stages of reading development.

(Note this study was done in the Netherlands with Dutch students learning to read in Dutch, but the results are consistent with research done in other languages, including English.)

The second study (you should be able to access this one, and double ditto on the trigger warning) is an experiment. It showed that children who learned to read words out of context (“in isolation”) were more likely to remember how to read the words a week later (out of context) compared to children who learned to read them in context:

The results indicated that children retained significantly more words learned in isolation (mean=69%) than words learned in context (mean=47%). (p. 123)

Note 1: “Word retention” meant that students were able to read significantly more words out of context a week after they first learned them. Recall that, as the first study demonstrated, being able to read words out of context was correlated with reading comprehension the following year, and that reading comprehension in all years correlated with reading comprehension the following year. So being able to read words out of context, or in isolation, is neither trivial nor irrelevant to reading achievement.

Note 2: The findings are clear but NOT black and white: Children who learned words in context retained nearly half the words. This is not trivial either. But it was significantly fewer—47%—compared to words learned in isolation—69%. In other words, students who learned the words out of context retained, on average, nearly 50% more words than students who learned the words in context.

This finding supports Devika’s comment during the video chat that Louise (in the comments to the post) neatly summed up, that some

… students who were taught multiple strategies—they used the path of least resistance—context clues and pictures. They got good at that but failed to learn decoding and hit a roadblock in learning to read.

This is a paradox this article points out:

Consistent with previous research, children read more words accurately in context than in isolation during self-teaching; however, children had better retention for words learned in isolation. Furthermore, this benefit from learning in isolation was larger for less skilled readers. (emphasis added)

(Thanks and a shout-out to DJ Bolger for suggesting this article.)

I don’t want to over-comment (PTSD still lingers from one of my daughters’ accusing me of mansplaining 🙀), so comments, discussion, arguments, contradictions, additional relevant empirical articles or anything else from others are welcome.

Next up: A second issue we discussed was how much of the written text do mature readers look at, see, or perceive as they read? Andy suggested that

Good readers don't look at every letter. They look at one, maybe 2 letters in the sentence, and they skip a lot of the words completely. Their brain is filling in the blanks. We know that for sure.

I countered that

I'm just wondering what research you're drawing on, because what you just said doesn't comport conform to the research that I know that all that readers look at every letter. They just do it so quickly. It seems like they're skipping around. So I'd be curious what research you would cite.

Upon digging further into the research and consulting with a couple of knowledgeable colleagues, I believe I overstated the case “that readers look at every letter.” I’ll have some articles to share for the next post that I hope shed light on this issue and where the data point regarding our contrasting positions.