Richard C. Anderson

Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading: A schema-theoretic view of basic processes in reading comprehension

… to completely analyze what we do when we read would almost be the acme of a psychologists dream for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind, as well as to unravel the tangled story of the most remarkable specific performance that civilization has learned in all its history. (Huey, 1908/1968, p. 8) Hueys eloquent statement about the goals of the psychology of reading is as relevant today as it was when he wrote it in 1908. The quotation usually precedes an apology for how little we have learned in the past 75 years. We wish to break with that tradition and use Hueys statement to introduce an essay in which we will try to demonstrate that while we have not fully achieved Hueys goal, we have made substantial progress. Our task is to characterize basic processes of reading comprehension. We will not present a model of the entire reading process, beginning with the focusing of the eye on the printed page and ending with the encoding of information into long-term semantic memory or its subsequent retrieval for purposes of demonstrating comprehension to someone in the outer world. Instead, we will focus on one aspect of comprehension of particular importance to reading comprehension: the issue of how the readers schemata or knowledge already stored in memory, function in the process of interpreting new information and allowing it to enter and become a part of the knowledge store.

Learning Words from Context.

SCHOOL CHILDREN appear to increase their vocabularies by thousands of words per year. Many have hypothesized that a large proportion of this growth occurs through incidental learning from written context. However, experimental research has until now failed to provide unequivocal support of this hypothesis. The present study attempted to determine whether students do acquire measurable knowledge about unfamiliar words while reading natural text. Fifty-seven eighth-grade students of average and above average reading ability read either an expository or a narrative text about 1,000 words in length. After reading, subjects completed two vocabulary assessment tasks on 15 target words from each passage (thus serving as controls for the passage not read), an individual interview and a multiple-choice test, both designed to tap partial knowledge of word meanings. Results of within-subject, hierarchical regression analyses showed small but statistically reliable gains in word knowledge from context. Tentative extrapolations from the results and current estimates of the volume of childrens reading lead us to believe that incidental learning from context accounts for a substantial proportion of the vocabulary growth that occurs during the school years.

Recall of previously unrecallable information following a shift in perspective

College undergraduates read a story about two boys playing hooky from school from the perspective of either a burglar or a person interested in buying a home. After recalling the story once, subjects were directed to shift perspectives and then recall the story again. In two experiments, subjects produced on the second recall significantly more information important to the second perspective that had been unimportant to the first. They also recalled less information unimportant to the second perspective which had been important to the first. These data clearly show the operation of retrieval processes independent from encoding processes. An analysis of interview protocols suggested that the instruction to take a new perspective led subjects to invoke a schema that provided implicit cues for different categories of story information.

Frameworks for Comprehending Discourse

Thirty physical education students and 30 music education students read a passage that could be given either a prison break or a wrestling interpretation, and another passage that could be understood in terms of an evening of card playing or a rehearsal session of a woodwind ensemble. Scores on disambiguating multiple choice tests and theme-revealing disambiguations and intrusions in free recall showed striking relationships to the subject’s background. These results indicate that high-level schemata provide the interpretative framework for comprehending discourse. The fact that most subjects gave each passage one distinct interpretation or another and reported being unaware of other perspectives while reading suggest that schemata can cause a person to see a message in a certain way, without even considering alternative interpretations.

Learning Word Meanings From Context During Normal Reading

This study investigated incidental learning of word meanings from context during normal reading. A total of 352 students in third, fifth, and seventh grades read either expository or narrative passages selected from grade-level textbooks, and after six days were tested on their knowledge of difficult words from the passages. Small but reliable gains in knowledge of words from the passages read were found at all grade and ability levels. Effects of word and text properties on learning from context were examined in some detail. Word properties investigated included length, morphological complexity, and part of speech. Text properties included the strength of contextual support for each word, readability as measured by standard formulas, and several measures of density of difficult words. Among the word properties, only conceptual difficulty was significantly related to learning from context. Among the text properties, learning from context was most strongly influenced by the proportion of unfamiliar words that were conceptually difficult and by the average length of unfamiliar words.

A cross-cultural perspective on reading comprehension

SUBJECTS FROM THE UNITED STATES and India read letters about an Indian and an American wedding and recalled them following interpolated tasks. Subjects read the native passage more rapidly, recalled a larger amount of information from the native passage, produced more culturally appropriate elaborations of the native passage, and produced more culturally based distortions of the foreign passage. Whether recalling the native or foreign passage, subjects recalled more of the text elements rated as important by other subjects with the same cultural heritage. The results were interpreted as showing the pervasive influence on comprehension and memory of schemata embodying knowledge of the content of a discourse.

Morphological Awareness and Learning to Read: A Cross-Language Perspective

In the past decade, there has been a surge of interest in morphological awareness, which refers to the ability to reflect on and manipulate morphemes and word formation rules in a language. This review provides a critical synthesis of empirical studies on this topic from a broad cross-linguistic perspective. Research with children speaking several languages indicates that knowledge of inflectional morphology is acquired before knowledge of derivational morphology and the morphology of compounds, which continue to develop through the elementary school years. Research establishes that morphological awareness contributes to the decoding of morphologically complex words and contributes to the development of reading comprehension, although the relationship is probably reciprocal rather than unidirectional. Morphological awareness becomes an increasingly important predictor of measures of reading as children grow older. Morphological awareness is intertwined with other aspects of metalinguistic awareness and linguistic competence—notably, phonological awareness, syntactic awareness, and vocabulary knowledge. Lack of satisfactory control of these intertwined elements is one of several shortcomings of the existing literature.

Schemata as Scaffolding for the Representation of Information in Connected Discourse

Information that is significant in the light of die conceptual framework, or “schema,” within which a text is interpreted ought to be better learned and recalled than less significant information. This hypothesis was evaluated in an experiment in which college students read narratives about a meal at a fine restaurant or a trip to a supermarket. The same 18 items of food, attributed to the same characters, were mentioned in the same order in the two stories. As predicted, foods from categories determined to be part of most people’s restaurant schemata were better recalled by students who read the restaurant narrative. Also as predicted, students who received the restaurant narrative were more likely to recall the character to whom a food had been attributed. However, contrary to expectation, participants were equally likely to reproduce food-order information whichever passage they had read. Information of the same significance in the context of either the restaurant or supermarket story was equally well recalled by the two groups.

On asking people questions about what they are reading

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the effects of asking people questions during or shortly after exposure to text passages. It also presents several original experiments designed to evaluate a model of the “direct” effects of questions and a report of an attempt to use questioning techniques in an ongoing instructional program is presented. The chapter also contains discussions of (a) the kinds of effects of questions, their magnitude and consistency, (b) the conditions under which questioning facilitates learning, (c) an appraisal of the explanations which have been proposed to account for the effects of questions, and (d) a brief evaluation of the practical educational implications of questioning techniques. However, the set of experiments presented in the chapter failed in its major objective, which was to give rise to a theory of the direct effects of questions. The most important findings of the present research are that in every experiment, verbatim scores are significantly higher than paraphrase scores when the questions are asked immediately after reading the passage, and that verbatim scores declines more over a one-week interval than did paraphrase scores. The most plausible interpretation of these facts is that there are at least two kinds of memory code, a close-to-surface code with a relatively short memorial half life, and a more permanent semantic-based code.

Properties of School Chinese: Implications for Learning to Read

The properties of the 2,570 Chinese characters explicitly taught in Chinese elementary schools were systematically investigated, including types of characters, visual complexity, spatial structure, phonetic regularity and consistency, semantic transparency, independent and bound components, and phonetic and semantic families. Among the findings are that the visual complexity, phonetic regularity, and semantic transparency of the Chinese characters taught in elementary school increase from the early grades to the later grades: Characters introduced in the 1st or 2nd grade typically contain fewer strokes, but are less likely to be regular or transparent, than characters introduced in the 5th or 6th grade. The inverse relation holds when characters are stratified by frequency. Low-frequency characters tend to be visually complex, phonetically regular, and semantically transparent whereas high-frequency characters tend to be the opposite. Combined with other findings, the analysis suggests that written Chinese has a logic that children can understand and use.