Knowledge is Necessary to Reading Comprehension
Willingham writes, “Background knowledge helps you understand what someone is talking about or writing.”
Background information provides vocabulary. Vocabulary is important not only for understanding idea A, but also the connection between ideas A and B. But, quite often, vocabulary is not enough to help comprehension.
“Reading comprehension depends on combining the ideas in a passage, not just comprehending each idea on its own. And writing contains gaps - lots of gaps – from which the writer omits information that is necessary to understand the logical flow of ideas. Writers assume that the reader has the knowledge to fill in the gaps.”
For example:
“I’m not trying out my new barbeque when the boss comes to dinner!” Mark yelled.
Without going into too much detail to convey his meaning, the writer assumes the reader knows that Mark doesn’t know how hot the new grill gets, nor does he know whether or not it has extra hot areas that might burn the food if it’s not watched adequately. The writer also assumes the reader knows that Mark wants to make a good impression and not serve an over or under cooked meal to his boss.
Sufficient background knowledge is key to understanding Mark’s reticence. Because of their differing background knowledge, Mark’s child might not understand, while mom certainly will. I cold easily see the child saying, “But why not Dad?”
As an aside, how much of our conversations with children assume a certain level of background knowledge on their part? How frustrated do we adults get when we have to “fill in the gaps” with information we thought the children knew?
Next Willingham introduces the concept of “chunking”. He defines it as “the phenomenon of tying together separate pieces of information from the environment.” The more information you can “chunk”, the more space you have for storing information in your working memory. This means you can hold a concept or procedure i.e., lots of information, in your working memory without it taking up lots of space. However, chunking works “…only when you have applicable factual knowledge in long-term memory.”
For example look at the following list:
XCN
NPH
DFB
ICI
ANC
AAX
Now cover it and see how many of the three letter groups you can remember.
Look at this list:
X
CNN
PHD
FBI
CIA
NCAA
X
I bet you can remember the letters from this list better than the previous one. Why? Because the the three letter groupings made up acronyms stored in your long-term memory. You were able to “chunk” the letters and bring them into your working memory. By the way, both lists were the same, only the spacing was different.
This was a working memory task. If you remember, working memory has a limited capacity. Since you were able to chunk more of the information from the second list than the first one, you were able to store more information (from your environment i.e., the list) in your working memory than you were be able to without the benefit of chunking.
Chunking is essential to reading comprehension. The more background information you have stored in the long-term memory, the greater the ability you will have to chunk different bits of knowledge, and the more information you can chunk, the more you can store in your working memory.
Although cooking i not reading, you can see the chunking principle at work on cooking reality shows. There’s always some type of challenge at the beginning of each episode. The aspiring chefs/contestants are given a few meager ingredients and told to come up with a dish in thirty minutes that will impress the judges. There’s no time to dream up or look up recipes.
I have always been impressed that these chefs could create a variety of respectable dishes with so few ingredients and so little time.
I usually attribute their success to their experience as chefs or cooks. But what is experience, if not the ability to draw on accumulated knowledge stored in the long-term memory over many years, chunk it, and then bring much of it into the working memory?
If you had to rely only on the environment (the different food ingredients) and concoct something, chances are very high that you would fail to create anything appetizing. Okay, now I’m getting hungry. Let’s get back to reading.
Look at the following example:
“Ashburn hit the ground ball to Wirtz, the shortstop, who threw it to Dark, the second baseman. Dark stepped on the bag, forcing out Cremin, who was running from first, and threw it to Anderson, the first baseman. Ashburn failed to beat the throw.”
If you can’t “chunk” this information, you have to work hard to envision the scene as you read it. It’s a slow process, because there’s a lot to keep track of. Who’s whom, who’s got the ball, and who’s running where. But, if you know baseball well, you chunk the information, access your long-term memory, and know you’ve just read about a double play.
“Thus, background knowledge allows chunking, which makes more room in working memory, which makes it easier to relate to ideas, and therefore to comprehend.”
Finally, “background knowledge also clarifies details that would otherwise be ambiguous and confusing.”
Another example:
“The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange items into different groups. Of course one group may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to a lack of facilities, that is the next step; otherwise, you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do few things at once than too many.”
If you had to describe this paragraph later, it might be hard and confusing, because the details are so vague. However, if you were told the title of the paragraph is “Washing Clothes”, you would have little trouble remembering it.
So we have four ways in which background knowledge is important to reading comprehension:
1. It provides vocabulary.
2. It allows you to bridge the logical gaps that writers leave.
3. It allows chunking, which increases room in working memory and thereby make it easier to tie ideas together.
4. It guides the interpretation of ambiguous sentences.
More to come!
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