“Daniel Willingham pulls back the curtain on the fascinating process of reading, explaining the discoveries of cognitive science in clear, accessible prose. For the many fans of Why Don't Students Like School, Willingham's new book offers more of the rigorous yet enjoyable science writing we love.”
—Annie Murphy Paul, author of The Brilliant Blog
“This is a superb book. Willingham's ability to make cognitive research on reading coherent and comprehensible is exceptional. I wish that it had been available when I taught courses about research on reading to education doctoral students. This book should be standard fare in every doctoral education course on reading.”
—Isabel L. Beck, professor emerita, School of Education, University of Pittsburgh
“What goes on in the mind as we read? How do people learn to read? What motivates some to read more than others? Does reading online differ from reading books? For those curious about these questions, and for those who care about children learning to read and growing as readers, this delightful, easy‐to‐read book explains this highly complex topic through fascinating studies and lively examples. With probing questions after each chapter, The Reading Mind will make a terrific book club read or textbook.”
—Ellen McIntyre, dean and professor, College of Education, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
“This is the book we've been waiting for. Willingham captures the magic of reading while simultaneously demystifying how we read. He brings key experimental findings to light as he takes us on the journey from recognizing individual words to constructing meaning from text. Beautifully written, clear and accessible, yet still embracing complexities rather than shying away from them—this book is essential reading for anyone interested in how we read.”
—Kate Nation, professor of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford; fellow and tutor in Psychology, St. John's College
“Yet again, Daniel Willingham proves himself genius extraordinaire at translating research to practice! At once a brilliant tutorial on how the bitwise investigations of the research lab have evolved into the ever more powerful and comprehensive models that now dominate cognitive science, and a blueprint for educational excellence, this book is a must for educational practitioners, policymakers, and students. No more top‐down versus bottom‐up reading wars: language, literacy, and knowledge are all of one piece and so, too, must be their development.”
—Marilyn Jager Adams, visiting scholar at Brown University
“Dan Willingham has done it again! This is another of his essential books for educational professionals, and anyone else interested in the reading process—sharing the cognitive science and practical implications of research in the domain of reading. No one does this kind of book better than Willingham!”
—Keith Stanovich, author of Progress in Understanding Reading and The Rationality Quotient
“This book is like a Malcolm Gladwell for anyone who is fascinated with how the mind works in literacy development. Willingham mixes his wonderful sense of humor with examples that are simply fun to read while conveying very important concepts about reading. Students will love it; parents will understand it; and scholars will wish that they wrote it!”
—Susan B. Neuman, professor of childhood education and literacy development, New York University
“The Reading Mind is an indispensable exploration of not only how we read, but why we read. An easy and entertaining read that draws on the science of the brain, books, and behavior, Willingham's work will deepen your understanding of the many facets of reading and literacy, as well as how the brain processes what amounts to an astoundingly complex and historically unlikely process. The Reading Mind should be required reading for anyone with a vested interest in the written word.”
—Kristofor Lauricella, history teacher, High School for Youth & Community Development, Brooklyn, New York
Copyright © 2017 by Daniel T. Willingham. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Willingham, Daniel T., author.
Title: The reading mind : a cognitive approach to understanding how the mind reads / Daniel T. Willingham.
Description: San Francisco, CA : Jossey‐Bass, 2017. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017004432 (print) | LCCN 2016059823 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119301370 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119301387 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119301363 (ePub)
Subjects: LCSH: Reading. | Reading comprehension. | Cognitive psychology.
Classification: LCC LB1050.2 .W55 2017 (ebook) | LCC LB1050.2 (print) | DDC 418/.4019—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004432
Cover design: Wiley
Cover image: © seamartini/Getty Images, Inc., © flytosky11/Getty Images, Inc.
FIRST EDITION
This book is dedicated to five of my teachers who taught me to love reading:
Gene Doherty, Joan Goodman, Joyce Gustafson, Richard Liewer, and Janet Stellenwerf.
We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. . . . I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.
| Table 1.1. | Watching a cash register |
| Table 6.1. | Examples personal to the author of how motivation relates to the value and expectation associated with different behaviors |
| Table 7.1. | Children's report of time spent per day on activity with media |
| Table C.1. | Conclusions drawn |
| Figure I.1 | One letter, different fonts |
| Figure I.2 | Ambiguous letters |
| Figure I.3 | Reversible figures |
| Figure I.4 | Medicine packaging |
| Figure 1.1. | A pictograph of a ram |
| Figure 1.2. | The ambiguity of pictographs |
| Figure 1.3. | Writing is a code for what you say |
| Figure 1.4. | The relationship of word sound and meaning |
| Figure 1.5. | Letters, translation rules, sound, and meaning |
| Figure 1.6. | The phonemes used in American English |
| Figure 2.1. | Natural scene with T's and L's |
| Figure 2.2. | Alphabetic shapes |
| Figure 2.3. | Letter confusion matrix |
| Figure 2.4. | Letter features |
| Figure 2.5. | Letter identification network |
| Figure 2.6. | Visual representation of the sound of a spoken sentence |
| Figure 2.7. | Comparison of accents |
| Figure 2.8. | Visual illusion |
| Figure 2.9. | First‐grade reading proficiency in European countries |
| Figure 2.10. | Average results from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) administered to 10‐year‐olds around the world |
| Figure 3.1. | Letters, sounds, and meaning |
| Figure 3.2. | Letters, sounds, meaning, and spelling |
| Figure 3.3. | How one might assume words are identified |
| Figure 3.4. | How words are identified—a more complete model |
| Figure 3.5. | Ambiguous letters |
| Figure 3.6. | Digits can substitute for letters |
| Figure 3.7. | Silent reading |
| Figure 4.1. | Letters, sound, spelling, and meaning |
| Figure 4.2. | Alternative representations for word definitions |
| Figure 4.3. | A meaning network for the concept spill |
| Figure 4.4. | Words activate related words |
| Figure 4.5. | Expanded network of word meanings for spill |
| Figure 5.1. | Model of reading expanded to include sentence representations |
| Figure 5.2. | A cartoon of the mental representation of a simple sentence |
| Figure 5.3. | Mental representation of two sentences |
| Figure 5.4. | Multiple sentences |
| Figure 5.5. | Model of reading expanded to include the idea-web |
| Figure 5.6. | Model of reading expanded to include the situation model |
| Figure 5.7. | Comparison of comprehension supported by reading skills or background knowledge |
| Figure 6.1. | Reading virtuous cycle |
| Figure 6.2. | Reading virtuous cycle with self-concept added |
| Figure 7.1. | Tree octopus |
| Figure 7.2. | Graph of word consumption |
| Figure C.1 | Model of reading |
Daniel Willingham earned his B.A. from Duke University in 1983 and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Harvard University in 1990. He is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1992. Until about 2000, his research focused solely on the brain basis of learning and memory. Today, all of his research concerns the application of cognitive psychology to K–16 education. He writes the “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” column for American Educator magazine, and is the author of Why Don't Students Like School? (Jossey‐Bass, 2009), When Can You Trust the Experts? (Jossey‐Bass, 2012), and Raising Kids Who Read (Jossey‐Bass, 2015). His writing on education has appeared in 14 languages. His website is www.danielwillingham.com.
My thanks to Marcia Invernizzi, Gail Lovette, and Mark Seidenberg for generously sharing their expertise in reading, and to Karin Chenoweth, Lisa Jakub, and Robert Pondiscio for providing feedback on parts of the manuscript. Steph Tatel and five anonymous reviewers were kind enough to read the whole thing, and offered useful, detailed reactions. I especially thank Chuck Clifton for taking on this chore—his comments greatly improved the manuscript. As always, my literary agent, Esmond Harmsworth, was generous with his wisdom and guidance. My colleagues at Jossey‐Bass, particularly my editor, Kate Gagnon, were superb. Finally, I thank Trisha Willingham, who provided astute feedback at all stages of the book, from conception to execution.
Picture this commonplace scene. I was on an airplane, reading E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate on my Kindle. The following passage is found near the end of the book, and when I read it, I softly gasped.
My goal in this book is to account for what happened in the few moments it took me to read those 43 words.
The environment held nothing more remarkable than black marks on a white screen, yet somehow I was mentally transported to another world, indeed, to a world quite alien to me: New York City some 30 years before my birth, populated by gangsters. How does the mind create a mental world from black marks? And why would I care enough about Otto “Abbadabba” Berman—a real‐life gangster portrayed sympathetically in this novel—to gasp when he's murdered?
The approach I'll take to answering these questions is cognitive. I'll describe what the mind is doing as we read, but I'll seldom consider what the brain is doing. That may sound shortsighted (the mind is, after all, what the brain does), but it's a common scientific approach taken over the last fifty years. Computer science offers an analogy. You can describe the steps of a calculation—say, figuring out the date of the next lunar eclipse viewable in Toronto—without describing what's happening in the electronic guts of the computer during this calculation. In the same way, I'm going to describe the steps by which your mind reads without specifying how the brain carries out those steps.
Cognitive psychologists commonly tackle large, daunting questions by breaking them down into smaller, more manageable questions. We do that by thinking through what had to happen in order for some bit of mental work to get done.
What had to happen between my seeing the letters on the screen and my emotional reaction to the events in an imagined world? I had to see the letters and identify them. I had to assemble the letters into words, and then the words into sentences, which I comprehended by applying grammatical rules. My emotional reaction entails not just comprehension, but memory. “He died of the effort” prompts pity only if you feel like you know Berman. So over the course of the novel I must have built and updated a sort of personality picture of this character. And of course memory is needed to organize the sequence of events into a coherent sense of the plot.
So, will this skeletal outline of what happened as I read Billy Bathgate serve as a starting point for a theory of reading?
Even my crude analysis shows that “what happens when we read?” is a bad scientific question, the type of question psychologists usually don't pose. Why? Think of all the millions of activities your mind can direct: you can guess the cost of a paperweight you see in an antique store, ride a child's tricycle for comic effect, make Chicken Milanese, invent a plausible excuse for missing your neighbor's son's middle school play, and so on. For each of these we might pose the question “What's happening in the mind when you do that?” But scientists don't. The reasons that scientists don't ask how you cook Chicken Milanese inform what I've included and excluded in this book, so it's worth describing these reasons in some detail.
The first reason is that task descriptions are not quite as simple as I've made out. I said “let's consider what had to happen” as I read that passage from Billy Bathgate, and then I said something like “you have to perceive the letters, and understand the words,” and so on. The history of psychology shows that it's easy to be fooled when you try to describe a task.
Here's a simple example. When we read it feels as if we move our eyes smoothly—we sweep from the start of a line to the end, and then snap back to the far left of the page for the next line. That impression is easily disconfirmed by watching the eyes of another person as she reads. Her eyes don't move smoothly, but instead jump from one spot to the next, usually a distance of seven to nine letters.2 That's so easily observed it's probably been known for centuries. But even that observation—jumping movements, not smooth tracking—is an incomplete description. In fact, your eyes are not always pointing at the same letter when you read.3 About half the time each eye looks at a different letter. They may even be slightly crossed.
The implications of this fact for an understanding of reading are not obvious. I raise the issue to point out that researchers have been working at an account of reading for over a century, and they are still finding ways of improving their description of what's actually happening when someone reads—not how they do it, but what they are doing. That's one reason psychologists usually don't try to explain really complicated behaviors. They figure that they probably shouldn't be confident they can adequately describe what they are explaining.
Suppose we give up on the idea that we'll have a perfect description of what people actually do during a complicated task, and we decide to settle for a provisional description. That's not a bad strategy—as we learn more, our description of the task will improve. One thing we're pretty confident about is that a complex task will require many different cognitive processes. My off‐the‐top‐of‐the‐head analysis of reading called for vision, memory, grammatical analysis, language comprehension, and emotion. Any one of these mental processes is known to be terribly complicated.
Consider seeing letters. One challenge is that letters can take on quite different appearances, varying in size, typeface, and typographical emphasis (bold, italic, etc.) (Figure I.1). How does my visual system treat these very different‐looking objects as equivalent?
Figure I.1. One letter, different fonts. These letters must all be interpreted as equivalent, even though they look different.
© Daniel Willingham
Worse yet, the very same shape might be interpreted as representing different letters, depending on the surrounding context (Figure I.2). So we need to do more than define what makes an “A” an “A”; we need to specify the context in which it will be seen as an “A.”
Figure I.2. Ambiguous letters. Although I'm sure you read this sentence easily, if you look closely you'll notice the “e”s in the word “need” are the same shape as the “c” in “clean.” And the same shape is interpreted as a “v” and as a “u” in the word “volunteer.”
© Daniel Willingham
Finally, note that we've taken for granted that we're looking at black characters on a white background. How could it be otherwise? But what dictates that “the black bits define the objects, whereas the white is background”? Differentiating objects from their background is so embedded in our visual system that we seldom notice that it's an issue, unless we're looking at one of those clever images where the object and background are ambiguous (Figure I.3).
Figure I.3. Reversible figures. At left, the black area can be seen as an object (vase) and the white area as background, or the white area seen as the object (dog profiles) and the black as background. At right, the mirror is seen as background when we focus on the woman and her reflection, but it may also been seen as the foreground object—a skull.
Vase © Tasha Volkova via Shutterstock; “All is Vanity” by C. Allan Gilbert. Public Domain http://bit.ly/2a2Nddd
Now suppose the complicated work of identifying letters is complete, and I've assembled the letters into words. My mind is trying to sort out the meaning of what I've read. One problem is that some words have multiple meanings. In the Billy Bathgate passage, Berman starts his brief speech with the word “Right.” What did I think he meant when I read that word? Morally correct, as in “the right thing to do”? Or perhaps agreeing with the facts of the matter, as in “You got that right.” Or appropriate, as in “the right tool for the job.” A few words later Berman uses the word “left” and so it becomes clearer that when he said “right” he was probably signifying a direction. But before I read “left,” what did I suppose “right” meant? Did I suspend judgment, hoping for clarifying information later? It doesn't feel like we do that. For example, if you read, “Later that afternoon, he went to the bank,” you probably don't think to yourself, “he might have gone to a financial institution or he might have gone to the edge of a river bed, but I don't know which.” You pick one meaning and go with it. But how do you pick? And what about sentences that require you to keep more than one sense of the word in mind simultaneously? For example, in Chapter 1 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain says that two fighting boys “covered themselves in dust and glory.” So a single instance of the word “covered” is simultaneously literal (for dust) and figurative (for glory). How does that work?
I could go on and describe how reading depends on memory, on your powers of inference and problem solving, even on your ability to time movements with great precision—eye movements must be perfectly synchronized with ongoing reading—but you get the idea. Reading—or cooking Chicken Milanese, or any moderately complex task—calls on so many mental processes that an agenda to provide a cognitive explanation comes perilously close to the goal “I'm gonna explain the mind.” There's too much.
I've discussed two reasons psychologists don't pose questions like “how do people cook Chicken Milanese?” or “how do people read?” First, because the task is complex we suspect we'd botch our description of what people are doing as they attempt it, so our theory of the mental events underlying the task would be wrong from the start. Second, the complexity of the task suggests it calls on many mental processes, and a theory of how the mind achieves the task may be too ambitious.
But reading differs from cooking Chicken Milanese in an important way: it matters. Reading matters in our day‐to‐day affairs, in our culture, in our economy, in our civic lives, in the arts, and so on. There are stakes attached to people reading well or poorly (Figure I.4). It's true that psychologists seldom try to account for really complex tasks, but they make an exception for reading, as well as a handful of other consequential tasks, like driving a car.
Figure I.4. Medicine packaging. Literate people likely do not notice how frequently they rely on the ability to read. Here I've blurred the print on medicine packaging to help you imagine being unable to read, and trying to select a medicine for your child's sore throat, perhaps by attempting to match packaging with your memory of television commercials.
Still, the Chicken Milanese problems are real, so we need to deal with them as best we can. What can we do about the task description problem? What if we're trying to account for how people read but we're getting wrong what reading really means, just as people used to get wrong the bit about eye movements during reading? The brute truth is that there's no solution. That's the nature of science, and the best we can do is keep the possibility in mind, and try to be clear‐eyed when we describe the process of reading. Thus, in this book I'll devote a lot of energy to analyzing the task of reading.
How about the complexity problem, the fact that there are so many processes required to read? Here, we must accept that our account of reading will be incomplete. We can't fully describe how people identify letters, how they separate objects from background, and all the rest. So the question is, what will we try to explain, and what will we disregard?
We might say to ourselves “well, we don't need to explain how people separate letters from background because that's not really a reading process. It's a process for all of vision, and you happen to use it when you read. So let's set the goal of accounting for the reading stuff, and we'll leave the more general‐purpose thinking processes for someone else to figure out.” That won't work, because all of the mental machinery that supports reading is borrowed. Reading is less than 6,000 years old; that's precious little time for any reading‐specific thinking processes to have evolved, and there's not much evidence that any have. The mental processes that contribute to reading evolved for another purpose, and we co‐opt them for the act of reading.
A better principle will be for us to ignore the mental processes that don't vary much from person to person. Separating objects from background is a good example. Yes, it's a complicated, mysterious process, but somehow anyone with typical vision does it. Crucial to our purposes, when people struggle to read it's not due to a failure of this process. And strong readers are no better than average readers in separating objects from background. So although this process is indispensable for reading it's not the first thing we want to explain.
Researchers do know something about the mental differences between strong and weak readers. A strong reader has a broad vocabulary, and would know the meaning of the word “arduous” in the Billy Bathgate passage. A strong reader would comprehend that Berman is telling Billy the combination to a safe, even though the safe goes unmentioned in the passage. Come to that, we'd guess that a strong reader would be reading in the first place, on a plane, when he could be playing a game on his phone, watching a movie, or sleeping. These factors—broad vocabulary, good comprehension skills, motivation—are quite commonsensical. Accounting for them will get more interesting when we start to engage in task analysis, as I promised we would. What are the differences in personality or attitudes between the people on an airplane who choose to read and those who don't? Is reading from a Kindle different than reading from paper? How can you make sense of a passage that depends on your knowledge of combination safes, but doesn't mention a combination safe?
I've emphasized the complexity of reading. We will therefore take it one step at a time, starting from the ground floor, so to speak: how readers see letters, then moving on to how they see words, then sentences, and so on, with one chapter devoted to each topic. In keeping with the emphasis on close analysis of the task, each chapter frames an aspect of reading as a problem: how is this bit of mental work accomplished?
That emphasis on task analysis will also prompt us to begin not with reading, but with writing (Chapter 1). Considering its purpose will help us better appreciate what readers actually do when they read letters and words (Chapters 2 and 3). From there we can consider word meaning (Chapter 4), and the comprehension of sentences and paragraphs (Chapter 5). Having this understanding of the process of reading will prepare us to consider why people might be motivated to read—or not (Chapter 6). Finally, we'll consider the possibility that digital technologies should prompt us to rethink everything we know about reading, as they have so radically changed other aspects of our lives (Chapter 7).
The Reading MindThe Science of Reading
The second limitation of this book is that it's not about how people learn to read. I aim to describe how an experienced reader reads, not how a novice learns. That said, a great deal of reading research has been conducted with novice readers, and some it will be relevant to our purpose. I'll flag these studies when I refer to them, to help keep clear in your mind the difference between the mind of the expert reader and the mind of the learner.
Although this book is not offered as a summary of the learning‐to‐read research, some of the conclusions drawn may be applicable to education. However, these implications must be drawn with caution. This book is based on basic science, and basic science seeks to describe the world as it is; in this case, to describe the mind of a reader. Education is not a basic science, but an applied science. Applied sciences do not seek to describe the world as it is, but rather to change the world, to make it more like some ideal vision of what the world ought to be like. In the case of reading education the “change” is the transformation of people who cannot read into readers.
Applying findings from basic science to that effort is not straightforward.4 For example, many of the studies I'll cite were conducted with experienced readers, and their reading may be different than that of those learning to read. In addition, many studies deal with one, isolated aspect of reading—how we know the meaning of a word, for example, or how we read a misspelled word in the middle of a text. But when we consider reading education, we can't think about aspects of reading in isolation. Doing so entails the risk that we'll change instruction to improve one aspect of reading and unwittingly worsen another aspect. To provide an obvious example, long practice sessions studying letter‐sound relationships may help improve decoding, but it may also prompt a decline in reading motivation. With these cautions in mind, I will offer some thoughts at the end of each chapter as to conclusions that scientists can offer that might be useful to practitioners.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before we contemplate how the science of reading can be useful to educators, let's review some of the science of reading. True to our commitment to examine carefully what a task really entails, we will begin our analysis not with the reading mind, but with the alphabet.