Why Does My Child Understand One Book and Not Another?
You are sitting beside your child while she reads, and every word is coming out right. Then you notice her face. Somewhere in the middle of the page she has gone quiet and blank.
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Why Does My Child Understand One Book and Not Another?
A practical Read With Me guide to the blank look that arrives in the middle of a page: why understanding depends on what a reader already knows, and how to hand a child the missing half of a book.
In this episode
- Why the same child reads one book beautifully and loses the thread of another
- What sixty-four students, a model baseball field, and a quiz about the game revealed about reading
- The gap a picture book leaves for the reader to fill in — and what happens when a child cannot
- Why the problem so often shows up in fourth grade rather than first
- Two minutes of preparation before you open a new book, and the habits that build knowledge over months
In 1987, two researchers at Marquette University in Milwaukee gave the same short story to sixty-four junior high students, one at a time. The story described half an inning of a made-up baseball game, written at about a fifth-grade reading level. In the room stood a model baseball field with small wooden players, and each student used it to act the play out. The students had also been tested on how much baseball they knew. Reading ability barely mattered. Baseball knowledge mattered enormously, and the weaker readers who knew the game understood that passage better than the strongest readers who did not. 1
Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia, explains the advantage those readers had. A reader who knows baseball does not hold a dozen separate actions in mind. The throw to second and the throw to first arrive as one thing, a double play, and that leaves working memory free for the play itself. 2
His larger point is that comprehension demands background knowledge because language is full of gaps the reader has to close. Willingham offers a line about a man whose face falls as he looks down at his belly, an invitation that specifies black tie, and a tuxedo he has not worn since his own wedding twenty years earlier. Nothing on the page says the tuxedo will not fit. The reader supplies that, and a reader who cannot is simply lost. 2
Sonia Cabell, at Florida State University's Florida Center for Reading Research, takes the same idea into a picture book. In Knuffle Bunny Too, Trixie marches into her parents' room in the middle of the night holding a toy that is not hers. Her father asks whether they can deal with this in the morning. Then the next line says he went to the phone. The page never says the father wanted to sleep, or why a tired man would call another family at that hour. The reader brings that, along with what it feels like to have a small thing matter more than sleep. 3
Cabell also explains why this so often ambushes parents in the upper elementary years: the texts change underneath the child. Kindergarten and first grade run mostly on short stories. By fourth grade, a large share of reading is informational — a biography, a chapter about rocks, a few pages on the solar system. Her example is a page from a children's book about rocks and minerals, where meteorites, asteroids defined after a comma, and fragments of comets lead into a sentence saying that a massive meteorite may have caused the dinosaurs to become extinct. To follow it, a child needs the vocabulary, the sentence structure, and some picture of the solar system already in place. 3
The hopeful part is that knowledge is not a skill to drill. It grows from talk, from reading widely, and from time spent on a subject for its own sake. 2
Cabell's own list for the early years: back-and-forth conversation on real topics, read-alouds of books a few grade levels above what a child can decode, several texts on one topic rather than one text on several, child-friendly definitions of a few chosen words, and science and social studies pursued in depth through discussion, writing, and hands-on inquiry. 3
Try it together
- Before you open a new book, spend two minutes on the world inside it. If it is about a girl who lives on a boat, ask whether your child has ever seen the sea, and tell them what a boat smells like. If it is about snow, use a photograph or a memory of your own.
- Read several books on one subject rather than one book on many. When teachers read a run of books about the water cycle instead of a single book about weather, children's vocabulary and understanding both grow further. 3
- Read aloud books a few grade levels above what your child can read alone. The words and the sentences in books are longer and stranger than the ones at the kitchen table, and that gap is what builds the language your child will need later.
- When the meaning breaks down mid-page, reach for the missing fact instead of another run at the sentence. Usually the reading is fine; the child is missing one thing the page assumed.
- Remember what the blank look is. A child who has read every word and understood nothing has not failed at reading. She has met a page that expects a world nobody has handed her yet.
The question worth carrying into your next read: what does this page expect us to already know?
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