By Sara DeMartino
The reading rope (Scarborough, 2001) has been making the rounds in both district and policy conversations about the science of reading. The rope is a useful tool for visualizing the many threads that make up becoming a skilled reader, although some will argue that it does not capture the full picture (see Duke & Cartwright, 2021 for a discussion of the different models of reading development). On its most basic level, the rope is a presentation of the processes and knowledge that fluent readers bring with them to reading tasks.
While the rope is a representation of reading development that’s pretty familiar to reading specialists and elementary school teachers, it might be new to secondary teachers who may not have had any or a limited amount of teacher preparation work on learning to read (and who may be nervous about the prospect of having to teach phonics).
From “Connecting Early Language and Literacy to Later Reading (Dis)abilities: Evidence, Theory, and Practice,”
by H.S. Scarborough, 2001, in S.B. Neuman and D.K. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook of Early Literacy Research
(Vol. 1, p. 98), New York, NY: Guilford. Copyright 2001 by The Guilford
The general expectation is that by the time students enter middle school, word recognition becomes more automatic and students are working to weave the processes of word recognition and language comprehension together to form a solid (and complex) rope. Because curriculum and policy traditionally assumes (and science tells us) the foundation for the development of these processes has been built in elementary school, many secondary teacher preparation programs barely touch on or completely neglect classwork on learning to read and phonics instruction. However, the reality is that students are entering secondary classrooms with unfinished learning for multiple reasons (Covid, lack of high-quality resources, balanced literacy that wasn’t quite balanced, etc.) and phonics is being asked of many unprepared middle school teachers as a way to try and fill the gap in reading achievement. While phonics and the work in the word recognition strand are critical to becoming a skilled reader, what’s often neglected in conversations around reading policy is the work encompassed by the language comprehension strand (the top strand) of Scarborough’s rope, particularly the role that background knowledge plays in reading comprehension. This is a piece of work that secondary teachers can immediately add into their instruction without specialized knowledge about teaching phonics.
Knowledge plays a key role in building language comprehension. Looking across a school year, this means that instructional units should cohere and help students build and access knowledge across texts within a unit as well as across instructional units. This includes both contextual or conceptual knowledge and literary knowledge. Research has shown that background knowledge is a strong predictor of comprehension, even when texts are beyond what has been deemed a student’s independent reading level (Hirsch, 2003; Cabell & Hwang, 2020, Shanahan, 2023). Knowledge that contributes to students’ ability to read and comprehend complex texts includes:
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- tier 2 & tier 3 vocabulary
- genre specific knowledge
- context for writing
- content specific knowledge (i.e., scientific or historical knowledge relevant to the text)
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Building and accessing knowledge doesn’t need to add days to instruction, but it needs to provide enough of a foundation that students aren’t left wondering, for example, why Swift (Jonathan, not Taylor) was allowed to suggest eating babies in “A modest proposal” (a quick overview of satire and a little context for Swift’s writing is useful in reducing that confusion). Although there are a variety of ways to address background knowledge, below is one example of how you can help students build and access background knowledge that will aid in comprehension of texts.
Example: Accessing & building contextual knowledge
Context of the background task: Eighth grade students are beginning to engage in a unit comprised of speeches and narratives about equity and freedom written before and after the Civil War. Students have had some work on the Civil War in their history class, but not with the texts in the unit. During the unit, students will be asked to read Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” excerpts from Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and Truth’s “Ain’t I a woman?” Students will begin the unit with comprehension work on “Ain’t I a woman?” and the teacher has recognized that while her students have had work on pre-Civil War America and Reconstruction, it would be helpful to spend time situating Truth’s speech.
To access and build background knowledge, the teacher does the following:
Whole group work (5 minutes): The teacher showed students an image of Sojourner Truth and explained that Truth was born into slavery in 1797 in New York. She was bought and sold four times before running away in 1827 with her infant daughter. An abolitionist family bought her freedom for $20. Truth became an abolitionist herself and fought both for the rights of slaves and the rights of women. Truth died in 1883.
Pair work (15 minutes): After a brief discussion about Truth, the teacher provided students with a list of events and asked them to work with a partner to put these events on a timeline. The events students are asked to work with are:
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- Start of Civil War
- End of Civil War
- Emancipation Proclamation
- Women’s Rights Convention (where Truth gave her speech)
- Women get the right to vote (19th amendment)
- Black men get the right to vote (15th amendment)
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Because students have had instructional work in history about this time period, there doesn’t need to be a whole lot of time spent on research of events. But it is important that students understand that Truth’s speech was given prior to the start of the Civil War.
Whole group presentation (5 minutes): After seeing that students had pretty much ordered the events correctly, rather than a gallery walk, the teacher asked one group to present their timeline and then asked students if they agreed with what had been placed on the timeline or if they had something different.
Individual quick write (5 minutes): Once the class was on the same page about the order of events, the teacher asked students to jot some quick noticings and wonderings about Truth and the speech she gave based on the timeline of events.
Pair/trio share (6 minutes): Students had a quick opportunity to talk about what they wrote with a partner and hear their partner’s thinking before being asked to share some ideas with the whole group.
Whole group discussion (10 minutes): Finally, students shared their ideas with the group, getting opportunities to agree, disagree, and add on to the ideas of other students. The teacher charted students’ thinking to keep track of their ideas. She also made sure to have students keep their writing in a place where they could access it after reading Truth’s speech.
The background knowledge piece took about half of the teacher’s instructional block to complete prior to asking students to engage in the comprehension task for Truth’s speech. The comprehension task asked students to read the speech and then respond to the question, “What’s Truth arguing in this speech?”
The background work became important artifacts that students revisited throughout the unit. After reading Truth’s speech, students revisited their noticings and wonderings about Truth to reflect on or revise what they originally thought. The teacher also asked students to reflect on the significance of Truth’s ideas considering when the speech was given in relationship to the other events on the timeline. As the class engaged with the other texts in the unit, the teacher asked students to go back to the timeline and add events about Frederick Douglass and Lincoln’s “Gettysburg address” to the information they had already noted. Students were able to use the timeline and the quick writes that they composed across the unit as tools to help them write an essay about the relationship among the ideas of the three authors in the unit.
In her reflections about the work, the teacher said that adding in this background piece deepened students’ understanding of the context in which all three authors were speaking/writing and helped students make connections between the reading they were being asked to do in English and the work they had already done in history. She noticed in past years that students had misconceptions, especially about Truth’s speech – thinking that she was speaking after the Civil War and after slavery had been completely abolished. By addressing the context in which Truth was speaking first, students were able to pull in more of what they understood about the time period to their writing and discussions about the speech.
The Importance of students having a coherent knowledge base should not be neglected as we support students to become fluent readers and as we continue discussions about better integrating the science of reading into instruction. It aids in comprehension, analysis, and interpretation of texts. We’d love to hear about how you’ve worked to build and access students’ knowledge base before you’ve engaged with a text.
Citations:
Cabell, S. Q., & Hwang, H. (2020). Building content knowledge to boost comprehension in the primary grades. Reading Research Quarterly, 55, S99-S107.
Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56, S25-S44.
Hirsch, E. D. (2003). Reading comprehension requires knowledge of words and the world. American educator, 27(1), 10-13.
Scarborough, H.S. (2001). Connecting early language and literacy to later reading (dis)abilities: Evidence, theory, and practice. In S.B. Neuman & D.K. Dickinson (Eds.), Handbook of early literacy research (Vol. 1, pp. 97–110). New York, NY: Guilford.
Shanahan, T. (2023, February 4). More on Hanford: Phonics reform and literacy levels. Shanahan on Literacy. https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/more-on-hanford-phonics-reform-and-literacy-levels