I’m about to describe a comprehension improvement strategy, but we also need to look at the cause of the associated comprehension problem.  I’m sure you agree that avoiding problems is better than treating them.  This problem is a big one.  It’s an avoidable problem that most teachers, administrators, parents, and other adults miss.  We are going to cover all aspects of this problem except its prevalence, which isn’t well known.  There is a simple treatment, but it’s time consuming, so it’s best implemented by reasonably literate parents. 

No one is blameless in the overall reading situation, not the many tutors, curriculum designers, test designers, or dictionary designers (like Webster; bless his heart).  The gigantic bureaucratic publishing companies and their marketing specialists are not blameless.  Blame is shouldered by the salespeople, the blasted robots that answer the phone, state and federal bureaucrats, slick politicians, curriculum selectors, and parents.  Nor are the children blameless.  In fact, the children often deserve a lot of blame.  The key point here is that blaming the children does not improve colleges of education, reading curriculum, school policies, teacher support, teacher training, administrator feedback, McGraw Hill’s materials, Pearson’s customer service, publisher marketing tactics, software, or anything else. 

Reading education is like a newly assembled Amish barn:  It takes a lot of people to carry it.  If one corner of that new barn is dragging, we know where to start looking for better answers.  Finding better children and parents is actually a partial solution, one that many private schools use to pump up their reputations and cash in.  That tends to concentrate weaker students in our public schools.  Furthermore, no child will enjoy a level of reading comprehension that is above his listening comprehension, so yeah, children often shoulder plenty of blame. 

Nonetheless, for every child that is holding a teacher or classroom back with bad behavior or a low reading aptitude, we will encounter a very similar child in that same classroom next year.  If things are to improve, it’s up to us because blaming today’s child has zero impact on future children or their disruptive behavior inside next year’s classroom.  Blaming children also annoys parents, who may already be hard to deal with.  From a principal’s point of view, any teaching problem can lead to an unpleasant parent-principal conference.  That goes triple for teachers.

And no—it’s not about money either.  As for you teachers, I have seen most of the issues you have to deal with and have dealt with many of them myself, so I definitely empathize.  In fact, I could list half a dozen teaching frustrations.  For example, some parents expect reading results practically overnight.  Teachers know better, but they get anxious themselves:  A classroom is a real pressure cooker—and when the boss stops by, he or she may turn up the heat all manner of impractical requests:  Then the teacher is steaming too.  “Teacher support,” is when the boss finds ways of lowering the flame.  Are you getting any support?  My colleagues didn’t get much support at my last school, but the support at my first school was much better. That means teacher support can be improved.  Better teacher support will improve many different aspects of education.  For starters, disruptive students should be separated from students who are ready to learn.

This essay has goals other than commiseration, so let’s get back to improving reading comprehension.  Recently, a principal asked me which problems we had to focus on to improve reading.  I said, “all of them.”  I’m sure he didn’t like the answer, which probably seemed glib.  One of the big problems with reading is that small mistakes cause big comprehension problems.  There are dozens of mistake types and they all need to be suppressed during reading instruction.  Focusing on suppressing a few mistake categories—and ignoring the other categories, doesn’t change reading outcomes much.

There is a way to detect—and often correct—reading mistakes the moment they happen. Properly trained students can catch about 97% of their reading mistakes.  Some children catch the mistakes, but then have trouble locating them precisely.  Let’s look at three tiny mistakes from our “Greatest Hits” list.

Insertion Error

“The ship disappeared into the frog” –versus

“The ship disappeared into the fog.”

Letter Order Error

Weak readers have no way of detecting these tiny but disastrous mistakes.  Inability to detect mistakes is a byproduct of several curriculum issues and curriculum implementation issues.  Strong readers think, Where did that frog come from and how big is it?  I thought I was reading about the 1700s, not monsters.  Strong readers stop and reread automatically.  It’s habit.  Here’s another common reading error…

“I was a UFO” –versus

“I saw a UFO.”

Errors like “I was a UFO” or “The ship disappeared into the frog” gradually teach a child that sentences often don’t make sense and that this is no cause for concern.  After all, thinks the child, it’s a children’s story: Maybe there is a frog out there that’s big enough to swallow a three masted schooner.  Such children just keep on reading, even though they know that no one has ever been… a UFO.  Ignoring mistakes is “The 13th reading problem.”

Letter Name Error

The 13th reading problem is caused by the other 12 reading problems.  And… it’s also caused by things we do, things we’re told to do, unexamined assumptions, intuitive urges we have, and pressures we’re under.  And by we, I mean… parents, curriculum designers, curriculum evaluators, teachers, tutors, and all the other actors carrying that new Amish barn.  –And I speak as a member of three of the categories shouldering this blame.  Let’s look at one more of our Greatest Hits…

“Ann liked arty” –versus

“Ann liked art.”

Notice how this tiny error completely changes the implications of the sentence.  The top sentence implies a budding friendship, possibly a romance.  The red mistake above is a letter-name mistake:  Instead of saying the sound of the letter (/t/), the reader said “tee,” (the letter’s name). This substitution changed “art” to Arty.  Letter-name mistakes are very common in first & second grade.  They’re also easily avoided, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.

Young readers plow ahead because they are getting comfortable with sentences that don’t make sense.  After all, thinks the child, maybe I’ll find out who Arty is in the next sentence.  Of course, a strong reader stops, and tries to locate his error by rereading or looking for the mystery name in nearby text.

All three of these mistakes remained grammatical.  In context, all three of these errors could have been detected, located (hopefully), and rectified.  To a young child, the statement that Ann liked “Arty” is plausible, so even though the youngster doesn’t have any idea who this “Arty” character is, the child just keeps on reading.  It’s our third manifestation of the 13th problem.  It’s a tendency to keep on reading even after something doesn’t make sense—either with respect to grammar, context, plot, or something else.  Naturally, this tendency lowers reading comprehension.  The more mistake-prone a reader is, the more it lowers his comprehension.  The 13th reading problem can be mild, but it’s often devastating.

Notice that all three of these errors belonged to different error categories (Insertion errors, letter order errors, & letter-name errors).  Nonetheless, we can still point to a single cause: The 13th error is caused by introducing story reading before children are ready to read stories.  This pedagogical mistake is completely understandable:  The hope is that children will get excited about reading and begin to read on their own.  –But no matter how excited about reading a child is, if he isn’t ready, he can’t do it.  Children who read on their own are teaching themselves to read—and that is a very good thing… unless… they are teaching themselves that some sentences don’t make sense and that this is no cause for concern.

When children are reading aloud, teachers, including me, sometimes choose to ignore mistakes for many good reasons, but this can also be overdone.  I am not advocating correcting every possible mistake.  I don’t; nor should you—but we should all be working together to prevent them at every stage of the teaching process.  I reiterate the main point:  Introducing story reading too early is possible and can reduce reading comprehension drastically when the student is older, as he or she ignores one mistake after another.  When a sentence doesn’t make sense, the correct thing to do is reread to find the mistake.  In the U.S., many teachers spend five or ten years teaching at a single grade level, so they never get to see how their reading curriculum is affecting students when they’re older.  And—of course, the curriculum designers have long since fled the scene of the crime.

If you’re a teacher and you made it all the way here, I want to compliment you on your dedication to your art.  After all, you’re not in charge of curriculum, and there is very little you can do about this problem.  I hope you will bring this article to the attention of someone in your district who can do something.  Before we wrap this up, let’s see how the other 12 reading problems team up to cause the 13^th reading problem. Then we’ll examine what you can do to minimize the impact of problem 13 on your students.

Most children don’t read smoothly, confidently, and accurately because…

1. They are still learning to decode from left to right,
2. They are still learning the sounds of rare letters,
3. They have blending problems,
4. They have trouble sounding out long words or complex words,
5. They are still learning consonant blends and common digraphs,
6. They have intonation problems,
7. They haven’t yet been exposed to complex grammar,
8. They are still learning how punctuation relates to speech pauses,
9. They have a small vocabulary,
10. They are still learning English—an especially big problem for recent immigrants,
11. They are still learning common abbreviations, like… , NE, & U.S., and finally,
12. They have formed the habit of guessing… a sight-word… whenever they see a short-word in their peripheral vision. They think: Here comes a short word; It’s time to guess.

When a child has several of the above problems, reading all those engaging and exciting stories can backfire by teaching the student that he should respond to nonsensical sentences by reading the next sentence instead of rereading the last one.  For many students, these exciting stories raise hope over and over—just before the endless mistakes dash it—over and over.  These students gradually begin to perceive those engaging stories as painful reminders of an unachievable goal, repeated failures, and classroom embarrassment.

Inside that busy, noisy echo chamber your bosses insist is a “classroom,” you may not have time to implement the following strategy.  To really minimize the 13th reading problem, the following strategy must be implemented often enough to help your students form the twin habits of noticing their mistakes and looking for them.  Therefore, I suggest that you show your more literate parents the following exercise, explain its importance, and give them a copy of the information below the photos.

1. If your child has good comprehension and doesn’t make many mistakes, he or she should read one sentence after another. You will interrupt anytime you think he or she may have made a mistake and ask your child to re-read the last sentence. When your child is noticing most of the sentences that “don’t make sense” and is automatically re-reading to search for his or her reading errors, things are going well. Children will often have trouble locating their errors for a variety of reasons. The main thing is to get them in the habit of re-reading and looking for their mistakes. Don’t be surprised if you must explain some errors or read a sentence yourself to find an error.


2. If your child’s comprehension is fairly low, have him or her summarize every single sentence the moment he or she finishes it. If the latest summary is wrong or incomplete, your child should reread the sentence and summarize it again. If your child didn’t fix the issue, you have two main choices.

A) You can read the sentence out loud yourself, so your child can hear what it should sound like. Verify your child can read the sentence properly before moving on.

B) You can explain the sentence or the mistake to your child. Verify your child can read the sentence properly before moving on.

One benefit of this is that you stay in touch with your child’s reading progress. You will be one of the first people to know if your child is falling behind.