palisadesk on the Great Decoders

Is it true there are lots of kids who decode fluently but have extremely poor reading comprehension?

Not really. You find the phenomenon of children who decode very well but understand almost nothing in only two populations: children with intellectual disabilities and children with very limited English. [yes! I am a "great decoder" in French & Spanish & probably in Italian and German as well. I understand quite a lot of what I read in Spanish (& used to understand a great deal); some of what I read in French; none of what I read in Italian and German. In my case great decoder/poor comprehender = not my native language]

In both groups you occasionally find students who quickly master the alphabetic principle, learn the required correspondences between sounds and symbols, and may even grasp patterns of speech and inflection, but do not know enough language to make sense of what they are reading. They lack the vocabulary, the syntactical sense (pronoun referents, subordinate clauses etc.)

In neither case (IMO) is it a problem that the student can decode well; the teaching challenge is to build the student's language comprehension in a variety of ways.

I often hear teachers say they have students who are "great decoders" and "poor comprehenders." I decided to investigate this phenomenon. I waved some $50 bills at a teachers' meeting and offered $200 to anyone who could find such a student for me who was NOT clearly an ELL case or a student with cognitive challenges.

I asked them to discriminate by using a simple task: take an example of text that the child can readily "decode" but can't "comprehend." Read the text to him or her, and do some oral comprehension items.

If the child can't answer the ORAL comprehension questions, you are not looking at a "reading" problem -- you have a language problem. Maybe vocabulary, maybe background knowledge, maybe receptive language comprehension generally --but not "reading."

On the other hand, if you have a child who understands material read aloud at a high level, but can't READ that text, you (usually) have a decoding problem.

We had a principal who used to tell staff that the school had lots of "great decoders" who were "poor comprehenders." (I think they tell them this stuff at principals' meetings.)

One year we tested the entire middle school (1:1 testing, more accurate). Guess what we found? We had NO students who were "great decoders" but "poor comprehenders," except for a few individuals in the recent immigrant or intellectually disabled group. We had DOZENS -- maybe a hundred -- kids who were poor DECODERS -- in almost every instance, they did not know vowel sounds, vowel digraphs/teams, or how to sound out multisyllable words. EVERY SINGLE KID said that their "strategy" for figuring out an unknown word was to "look at the first letter and guess." Now, where did they get that idea?

Something about DATA, as opposed to perception, changed attitudes. The principal started to encourage teaching decoding skills (without neglecting other important areas). Teachers became more aware of the need to teach kids to sound out words, to learn morphemes, word parts, and strategies for combining and disassembling them.

Now when we find kids who decode adequately, but are poor comprehenders, we usually see issues of rate and fluency. Children in eighth grade reading sixty words per minute can't keep up (Heck, sixty wpm won't cut it in FOURTH grade). So we work on that.

Stanovich somewhere put out a call in The Reading Teacher for data on students who were "great decoders" who could not understand what they read, and he got no useful case studies. Most students whom teachers refer to as "great decoders" are actually nothing of the kind -- if you measure what they do, they often lack critical decoding skills and read relatively slowly, so that the meaning of complex text gets lost in the effort required.