The Early Literacy Initiative will be running a theme on ‘Comprehension’ from October to December 2018.

The lack of meaning-making in Indian classrooms is something that has been noted and lamented by educators (e.g., Menon et al, 2017; Sinha, 2012). Meaning-making in classrooms seems out of reach for many students in contemporary classrooms. One reason for this could be that comprehension is often assessed, but rarely taught (Durkin, 1978). What does it mean to teach comprehension in complex multilingual Indian contexts? This theme will explore different facets of the problem and possible solutions proposed by practitioners and academics working in this domain.

To set the context, let us attempt to answer the question of what is meant by the term comprehension and discuss some factors and processes that enable it. Through a discussion of these processes, we hope to make an argument for why it is critical to give time and space to understanding comprehension within the early literacy curriculum.

Comprehension, at its simplest, can be understood as reading (or writing) with meaning. This is not a simple process. To make meaning while reading or writing, a set of complex processes come together collaboratively and simultaneously to assist the reader. Michael Pressley describes a few of these processes in his paper Comprehension instruction: What makes sense now, What might make sense soon (Pressley, 2001), which are presented here.

Effective Decoding and Word Recognition

Making sense of what we read first requires us to be able to easily decode, or recognise words in text. Otherwise, the larger share of the reader’s attention is dedicated to sounding out letters, words, and sentences. That can be so exhausting that the simultaneous process of deriving meaning from what’s being decoded gets broken. It is thus pertinent that the reader knows how to decode proficiently to comprehend what is being read.

However, is knowing how to decode words a sufficient condition for comprehension? Would it be correct to assume that if our readers are decoding accurately and at a sufficient pace, they would also be understanding the text they are reading? This takes us to the next process Pressley’s describes -- vocabulary instruction.

Vocabulary Instruction

Many times, the meanings of the words being decoded may be lost on the reader. There can be multiple reasons for this -- the child’s home language could be different from the school language, the text language could be a more standardised version of the spoken language, the words being encountered could be outside of the child’s oral repertoire. In all these cases, even when a child goes on to decode a word correctly, she may not be able to access what it means.

In my experience as an English teacher in a tribal context, I often found children easily learning to borrow previously learnt strategies to decode newer words. For example, a child who has been taught to read get by breaking the sounds into /g/, /e/,/t/ will, after sufficient practice, be able to decode ‘jet’. The word jet, however, could be an alien word to the young child’s context, and until it is embedded meaningfully in the child’s world, its decoding would remain rather futile. Vocabulary instructions, therefore, are an extremely important aspect of meaning making, expanding the reader’s ability to visually and mentally grapple with the text. It is also very important to enabling the reader to write meaningfully with access to a rich repertoire of words.

World Knowledge

In addition to decoding and vocabulary knowledge, what else could add to, or reduce from, the child’s ability to comprehend? Pressley proposes a third factor: world knowledge. Let’s consider these  four lines from one of my favourite poems.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

(Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken)

Thanks to a grandmother who loved literature, I was introduced to this poem as a little girl. Can one blame a little girl though if her biggest takeaway from this poem was  ‘yellow woods’, a term used in the beginning line of the poem, and the imagery of a man standing by a fork, stick in his hand, wondering which way to go? A child has no idea of metaphors, least of all that dilemmas can be translated into beautiful poetry about forests. Even though I understood all the words in the poem as a child, and could easily read them, the true meaning of this poem dawned on me much later in life. Why is that? My younger self lacked the life experiences or world knowledge to access the deeper meaning of the poem. This is a common experience of children:  even while reading age-appropriate texts, many readers lose or misunderstand the meaning of a text because they lack world knowledge to make sense of it.

In describing one of the many characteristics of a good reader, Duke and Pearson in their chapter “Effective practices for developing reading comprehension”, assert, “For good readers, text processing occurs not only during “reading” as we have traditionally defined it, but also during short breaks taken during reading, even after the “reading” itself has commenced, even after the “reading” has ceased.” (Duke & Pearson, 2009). How is it possible to continue reading even after reading has ceased? As readers, we bring in our worlds to the texts we read -- our experiences, our thoughts, our cultural knowledge -- in order to make sense of our readings. We do it before we read, as we read, and even after we finish reading. Our knowledge and experience feed into our readings and vice-versa. Therefore, to create good readers we also have to create diverse experiences, encourage and welcome different worlds, thoughts and knowledges of our children into the texts they read and write.   

Effective Comprehension Strategies

Will the ability to comprehend then flow naturally from these capabilities -- rich vocabularies and rich world knowledge?

For the longest time in the history of the scholarship and practice of reading instruction, comprehension has been seen as a passive process, something that a reader picks up on her own, once she has learnt how to decode. The assumption was that once the reader decoded the words, she would automatically understand it (if she also spoke and understood the language). However, we now know this is not the case!

A large body of research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s established conclusively that far from being a passive process, comprehension is an active, transactional process between the reader and the text (Duke & Pearson, 2009). A good reader is always questioning, predicting, analysing, imagining and interpreting the readings she does. She is actively present with the text, forging a relationship between the text and her experiences and needs.

These strategies are not invoked equally by all readers. Good readers appear to use them effortlessly, while poorer or younger readers need coaching in how to use cognitive strategies that permit them to comprehend. Children benefit from modeling and coaching on how to predict, infer, summarise, ask questions and clarify.

Monitoring

In addition to the factors described earlier, an important characteristic of a good reader is that they are able to think about and monitor their own reading. The ability to think about one’s own thinking is called “metacognition”. Good readers are highly metacognitive -- for example, they notice immediately when they lose meaning while reading. And they know how to fix their comprehension problems -- by re-reading, asking for help, etc.

Comprehension as a Social Process

To this list of processes, I will add another idea from the paper, Comprehension as social and intellectual practice: Rebuilding curriculum in low socioeconomic and cultural minority schools(Luke, Woods & Dooley, 2011).The premise of this paper is that as educators, we cannot afford to ignore the sociocultural and sociopolitical experiences of learners. What we derive from a text, how it makes sense to us, how it affects and transforms us (or not) is deeply rooted in our own personal, socio-cultural and political experiences. The award winning book, The Colour Purple, remains the most powerful book I have read so far for the way it takes me through the empowering journeys of black women. But how it affects women whose realities match the experiences described in that book will always be beyond my immediate comprehension. Identifying that our different experiences create paradigms within which we comprehend texts would help us become sensitive and open to diverse interpretations and exchanges within our classrooms.

Theme on Comprehension

Given the complexity of enabling comprehension in classrooms, and the serious need for it in Indian contexts today, we have dedicated our upcoming theme, to this aspect of early literacy. In addition to themed blog pieces, we have also have created a set of annotated readings and resources that will assist our readers in deepening their understanding of comprehension.

In the themed blog pieces, we propose to publish a series of blog pieces by academics and practitioners who have deep experience with this topic.

Shobha Sinha from Delhi University will help us understand the idea that comprehension is not a passive, but an active and interactive process. She will also explore the significance of that idea for classrooms in India. Dr. Shivani Nag from Ambedkar University, Delhi, will explore how comprehension can be understood and enabled within multilingual classrooms. Dr. Giridhar Rao from Azim Premji University will discuss how to facilitate meaning making for English language learners in Indian classrooms. These three pieces will set the theoretical context for the theme.

Apart from these, we will present a series of experience-based blog pieces by practitioners who have worked extensively on the ground in Indian classrooms. Manjiri Nimbkar will describe how Pragat Shikshan Sanstha (Phaltan, Maharashtra) supports meaning-making in their classrooms. Shubhra Chatterji from Vikramshila Education Society (Kolkata, West Bengal) will explain how to weave in talk, writing and comprehension in the classroom. Usha Mukunda, the librarian from alternative school Center for Learning, (Bangalore, Karnataka) will talk about how it is not sufficient to have a good library collection, or regular access to libraries in school spaces. She discusses how conversations around books enhance children’s meaning-making capabilities and their engagement with and appreciation of the books they read. A piece by Sujata Noronha (Bookworm, Goa), also a librarian, will help us understand how to select books that enable meaning-making by children.

Harshita Das from ELI will write about meaning-making and guided-reading. Shailaja Menon will discuss the potential and limitations of children’s prior knowledge for meaning making. Along with these, members of the ELI team will present a blog on supporting strategy instruction for meaning-making.

We are excited to share these blog pieces and resources with you! We hope you find them exciting too!

References

Duke, N. K., & Pearson, P. D. (2009). Effective practices for developing reading comprehension. Journal of education, 189(1-2), 107-122.

Durkin, D. (1978). What classroom observations reveal about reading comprehension instruction. Reading research quarterly, 481-533.

Luke, A., Woods, A., & Dooley, K. (2011). Comprehension as social and intellectual practice: Rebuilding curriculum in low socioeconomic and cultural minority schools. Theory Into Practice, 50(2), 157-164.

Menon, S., Krishnamurthy, R., Sajitha, S., Apte, N., Basargekar, A., Subramaniam, S., & Modugala, M. (2017). Literacy Research in Indian Languages (LiRiL): Report of a Three-Year Longitudinal Study on Early Reading and Writing in Marathi and Kannada. New Delhi: Tata Trusts.

Pressley, M. (2001). Comprehension instruction: What makes sense now, what might make sense soon. Reading online, 5(2),1-14.

Sinha, S. (2012). Reading without meaning: The dilemma of Indian classrooms. Language and Language Teaching, 1(1), 22-26.