I’m imagining an upcoming English lesson where my students will be reading an extract from ‘The Hate U Give’: the character of Khalil is pulled over by the police and there is a tense confrontation culminating in the officer shooting him – heavy stuff. The scene is provoking, and the class will react – I want to ask: “why did this happen?” and predicting the responses poses a clear dilemma. Student A – a white, disadvantaged student with a low reading age, living in a rural setting who has perhaps never encountered a police officer in his life, might raise their hand and say, “Khalil was rude to the officer, he didn’t follow his instructions so maybe it was fault.” Now we’re in a world of chaos; many of the high attaining, well-read, middle-class students with extensive cultural capital turn on them and shout them down for their “ignorant” comments, citing one of the (sadly) many instances of prejudice from authorities. Student A is now silenced, embarrassed and has not gained an inspired love of reading.
Lacking the contextual knowledge to make effective inferences from a text will prevent Student A from feeling the success needed to overcome the disadvantage gap when it comes to reading. As the Matthew Effect outlines, students who feel success in reading (generally ‘good readers’) develop at a faster pace than ‘poor readers’. Therefore, for reading in schools to have a meaningful long-term impact on our disadvantaged students who more likely have limited and poor prior experiences with reading, it is essential that every reading experience we expose them to is a success.
Context and Disadvantage
The statistics on the language gap, reading age differences and eventual GCSE outcomes for disadvantaged students are well-documented, with the EEF’s guidance report on Improving Secondary Literacy commenting on how 120,000 disadvantaged students in a single year arrived at secondary school below their expected reading ages. Within schools there is a general recognition that student literacy levels are an increasing concern, especially after COVID-19. Exacerbating the challenge of low literacy levels is a lack of cultural capital. If students are not exposed to a range of vocabulary, cultural opportunities, and a range of texts, it is inevitable that they lack the general knowledge that expert readers implicitly apply when approaching texts of all kinds. This poses our disadvantaged students a multitude of problems.
Reading is a complex process with expert readers able to actively comprehend and infer simultaneously while adapting strategies to approach multiple types and difficulties of texts. Not only do they rely on contextual knowledge when approaching new or challenging vocabulary, but they apply an expansive knowledge base to create a detailed situation model. As readers progress towards comprehending a text, they develop a mental (situation) model of the people, events, relationships, objects, and settings from the text to construct meaning. They develop these based on their existing knowledge bases, connecting what they already know to what they are discovering in the text (mental Velcro!); from all of this, comprehension emerges.
Consider, then, the implications and challenges of a lack of reading experience and contextual knowledge when approaching an unfamiliar text for the first time. A past GCSE English Language extract presents a scene of Zoe and Jake skiing in the Pyrenees. The students need to analyse the characters feelings on the mountain and their perceptions of the approaching avalanche. What does the student who has never been on a skiing holiday imagine – can they appreciate the scale of mountain range or sense the crisp alpine air? What does the student who hasn’t read ‘Touching the Void’ not know about the volatile conditions and dangers of a mountain? What does the student who hasn’t watched documentaries about natural disasters not know about the signs and deadliness of avalanches? What is the likelihood that they comprehend and infer the sense of danger alluded to in the extract in the same level of detail as their more contextually rich peers?
Situation Models - How can we guide students to the same situation model when their contextual knowledge determines how they mentally construct texts?
When planning to deliver a reading episode or before asking students to engage with a text, we need to ask ourselves:
What subject specific knowledge does this text rely on? What general knowledge and associations do we as expert readers make when reading this text? What vocabulary in the text requires contextual knowledge to comprehend the meaning of sentences and paragraphs? Does any of the vocabulary exist in multiple genres or subjects that needs contextualising within the text? What knowledge is needed for students to be able visualise the reading and to build mental models? How can we prepare activities in the pre‑, during‑, and post-reading process that allows and supports students in engaging with required contextual knowledge?
In my next blog, I will look at specific strategies and the challenging subject specific requirements with contextual knowledge.
References:
Podcast – 32. Reading is Learning: Breaking Down the artificial barrier with Natalie Wexler
Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition From Novice to Expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5 – 51. https://doi.org/10.1177/152910… (Original work published 2018)
