Let’s explore each of these elements individually, and then see how they work together.
Decoding First
Although we associate phonics with the early years of reading, even adult learners use these skills when they encounter unknown words. Consider the word ОДеЯЛО. Can you decipher it? This is the Russian word for “blanket.” Imagine you were a Russian preschool student; you would certainly know the word verbally, but if you had no phonetic knowledge of how to interpret the letters reflected in the word—no way to convert them to sound and meaning—you would be no closer to reading comprehension with this word than any of us with no knowledge of Russian.
Some of this word’s characters have familiar elements, but overall, most of us English speakers will look at this word and have absolutely no idea how to pronounce it. We might assume that the word ends with a “-row” sound, but we are also a little unsure of several of the ending characters. Is an inverted R pronounced differently than a regular R? And we have likely never seen anything like the second letter of this word unless we have taken Russian.
Clearly, readers need to be able to efficiently convert the symbols of reading into sounds and meanings, but we would be remiss if we associated phonics and decoding with direct access to comprehension. For phonics to instantly aid us in comprehension, we must already know the word. If we sound out a word and have never heard it before, we are no closer to comprehension. This brings us to the next element, vocabulary.
Vocabulary Forever
Conversations about the importance of vocabulary are endless. Teachers in every subject area or discipline value the vocabulary of their content and often issue student lists of discipline-specific, academic vocabulary. Indeed, vocabulary plays a critical role in understanding. Hirsch (2018) asserts that “vocabulary size is the single most reliable correlate to reading ability” (p. 48). From this, we can conclude that the words we know profoundly affect and accurately predict what we will be able to read and comprehend.
Vocabulary is so critical when seeking understanding that readers “have a pretty low tolerance for reading unknown words…. Just how much unknown stuff can a text have in it before a reader will declare mental overload and call it quits?” (Willingham, 2017, p. 90). It turns out that, while estimates vary among researchers, and comprehension depends on the reader’s attitude and motivation, the consensus is that readers need to know nearly all the words—98 percent—in order to comfortably comprehend what they’re reading (Willingham, 2017). Every standards document that we know of includes some ELA standard that requires students to use context clues to guess the meaning of unknown words, but without sufficient context (more than 98 percent known words), determining the meaning of unknown words is virtually impossible.
Every standards document that we know of includes some ELA standard that requires students to use context clues to guess the meaning of unknown words, but without sufficient context (more than 98 percent known words), determining the meaning of unknown words is virtually impossible.
So, with decoding ability and vocabulary, we are getting much closer to comprehension. However, these are only two of the big three. Without knowledge—the last element of the big three—it is possible for students to know how to decode all the words in a text and know what they mean, and still not comprehend what the author is trying to convey.
Knowledge Foremost
Let’s turn to “the most recently understood principle” of literacy: knowledge (Hirsch, 2003, p. 12). To understand why knowledge may be necessary even when you know all the words in a text, take a look at the following list of words.
• belonging
• call
• category
• contained
• intuition
• manifold
• means
• mine
• necessary
• represented
• self-consciousness
• synthesis
• understanding
• unity
You should be able to easily decode and define all these vocabulary words. You have two of the big three literacy elements covered. Armed with your decoding and vocabulary abilities, read the following short passage from Immanuel Kant’s (1781/1998) Critique of Pure Reason, and try to correctly answer the low-level question asking for basic recall on the passage’s main idea:
A manifold, contained in an intuition which I call mine, is represented, by means of the synthesis of the understanding, as belonging to the necessary unity of self-consciousness; and this is effected by means of the category.
The main idea of this passage is:
a. Without a manifold, one cannot call an intuition “mine.”
b. Intuition must precede understanding.
c. Intuition must occur through a category.
d. Self-consciousness is necessary to understanding. (Hirsch, 2006)
While some philosophy majors with adequate exposure to Kant’s work might have easily read the passage and correctly answered the corresponding question, many of us probably floundered, because we lack this background knowledge on Kant. Perhaps, in reading the passage, you felt like the elderly lady from a commonly told anecdote about Einstein. She attended a lecture on relativity given by the famous scientist, and afterward, she approached him and remarked, “I understood all the words. It was just how they were put together that baffled me” (Hirsch, 2003, p. 17). Hirsch (2006) critiques teachers’ tendency to try to teach reading comprehension skills by simply giving struggling readers more time to summarize, classify, and find the main idea, which he says these readers cannot possibly do without the necessary background knowledge.
To fully comprehend the provided passage, we need to know that Kant was deeply interested in how people perceive the world (intuition) through organizing mindsets, paradigms, or manifolds that they build over time based on their experiences. Combining this knowledge with our decoding and vocabulary abilities gets us much closer to the correct answer: C.
Willingham (2017) advances that background knowledge is a primary cause of flatlining reading scores: “Students from disadvantaged backgrounds show a characteristic pattern of reading achievement in school; they make good progress until around fourth grade, and then suddenly fall behind. The importance of background knowledge to comprehension gives us insight into this phenomenon” (p. 128).
We could summarize our entire discussion so far with the following statement, which reflects the big three: after one has learned the mechanics of reading, “growth depends, more than anything, on our ability to build up students’ knowledge base and vocabulary” (Schmoker, 2018, p. 27). And so now we turn our attention to how the three elements interact.
The Synergy Required for Comprehension
While it is helpful to analyze the elements of decoding, vocabulary, and knowledge separately to fully understand each of them, we must also realize that they interact like factors in an equation, the result of which is comprehension. In fact, missing elements in literacy cause the same kind of imbalance that comes with a missing element in an equation. Remember what happens when you multiply by zero. You could have all the knowledge needed to comprehend a text you are reading, and you could know all the text’s words