Psycholingustics
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A Brief History of Comprehension
by Doug Noon
The history of literacy theory became important for me when I chose to become a teacher, although I didnÐÐŽÐЇt know that until I went back to the university after teaching for 20 years. IÐÐŽÐЇm going to outline two not-quite parallel histories in order to explain why this weblog was initiated, and maybe help anyone who reads this to better understand their own literacy history.
Archaic thinking
Until the late 1950ÐÐŽÐЇs and early 60ÐÐŽÐЇs, around the time that I entered school, reading was regarded as merely a perceptual process. Comprehension was assumed to occur once the reader decoded the written symbols and reproduced them as spoken language. According to this view, the relatively simple job of the teacher was to teach children to discriminate among different letters and reproduce their sounds. To accomplish this, phonics and whole-word recognition were the prevailing instructional methodologies. A view of reading as decoding was consistent with behavioral theory, favored for instructional objectives during that historical period.
A linguistic perspective
Enter the linguist, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky recognized that since words have multiple meanings, comprehension of spoken language could not be explained as the strung-together meanings of a series of words. ChomskyÐÐŽÐЇs insight was that language, though very complex, was acquired by children easily and naturally through immersion in their social environment. Chomsky helped us to recognize that human beings are ÐÐŽÐowiredÐЎб to naturally acquire language from their home communities.
The psycholinguists
Psycholinguistics is a field that evolved out of ChomskyÐÐŽÐЇs work. Early researchers in this field who were interested in language acquisition found that children became skilled users of language by inferring and testing out rules for language as active participants in a language community. Reading theorists took up these research findings and asked what reading instruction would look like if we assumed that children learned to read and write in the same way that they learned to talk. In 1965 Kenneth Goodman published ÐÐŽÐoA Linguistic Study of Cues and Miscues in Reading.ÐЎб Goodman found that oral reading errors made by children provided access to their comprehension process, and should not be regarded as mistakes to be corrected. Two years later he developed a model that defined sense-making among readers as the ability to simultaneously use 3 different cueing systems: syntactic cues, semantic cues, and graphophonemic cues. He declared reading to be a ÐÐŽÐopsycholinguistic guessing game,ÐЎб a claim that attracted a lot of criticism from behaviorists.
Psycholinguists pushed the study of reading comprehension into the foreground, and moved reading research away from behavioral and perceptual analytical models. Their work caused educators to question the value of isolated skills instruction, and diminished the attraction of artificially controlled vocabularies in texts for beginning readers. Reading would no longer be viewed as simply a perceptual process. The study of reading became inextricably linked with the study of thought. The Age of Comprehension had been born.
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistic research focused on issues of dialect, and found that dialects were not poorly-formed variations of standard English, but were legitimate language systems with syntactic structures and developmental stages of acquisition for its speakers. Sociolinguists argued that dialectic differences in speech should not be regarded as deficits by educators, but should be accommodated while students learn to read and write. Sociolinguists introduced the idea that reading acquisition is a social process, much like that of oral language.
Cognitive theory
Jean Piaget was one of the major cognitive theorists. He used schema theory to explain how knowledge is acquired, and to describe stages of human intellectual development. His ideas, however, did not strongly influence thinking in the United States until the 1960ÐÐŽÐЇs. Schema theory, which describes the structure of human knowledge, contributed to our understanding of literacy. From schema theory we understand learning as a process in which we create mental models called schemata out of our experience. Some have described these structures as a mental filing system that is hierarchically organized. Schema theory helped reading theorists better understand the constructive nature of reading comprehension. Schema theory appealed to learning theorists as well as reading researchers. It emphasized the connections that readers – learners make between a text and their prior experience.
Constructivism
Schema theory provides a link from cognitivism to constructivism, a learning theory that serves as a kind of meta-theory since it provides us with a model for how we create mental models. Constructivism emphasizes the active engagement of learners in processes of meaning-making as they join new information to existing knowledge structures. When applied to reading, we are inclined to ask a fascinating question about where meaning is constructed. Does meaning reside in the text, in the intentions and motivation of the author, in the mind of the reader, or in the transaction between reader and text?
The discussion of constructivism brings us into the 1980ÐÐŽÐЇs and early 90ÐÐŽÐЇs. Differing views of constructivsm, however, make any single definition of it problematic. Out of a recognition that our social environment shapes our experience, constructivist thinking splintered in order to explore meaning making as it may occur in individuals, small groups, or communities. This conceptualization of constructivist theory is called social constructivism, and the work of Lev Vygotsky had a powerful influence on literacy researchers. But that story is for another time.
A new approach to literacy
The need for a theoretical framework that would encompass these various understandings and inform instructional decision-making generated a new theoretical domain for literacy education. The