Inside Education 428, Hugh Catts on Reading Comprehension and Dyslexia (25 April 2024)

Presented and produced by Seán Delaney.

In this episode I interview Hugh Catts from the Florida State University about reading comprehension, dyslexia and more. People interviewed on previous Inside Education podcasts are mentioned in this episode: Jerome Kagan, Daniel T. Willingham and Tim Shanahan.

Among the topics raised on the podcast are:

• How his interest in educational research grew from problems members of his family, including himself, had in learning to read.
• The benefits of having knowledge of phonetics and linguistics in studying reading difficulties
• His thoughts on whether someone with reading difficulties can teach reading well
• How he became interested in comprehension
• Why thinking about comprehension as a skill is unhelpful in teaching reading
• Comprehension is a complex set of behaviours or cognitive processes that is more like listening. It is the interaction between the reader and the text they’re reading to construct meaning between what is written in the text and what the reader already knows about the topic.
• Comprehension needs to be taught within the context of the subject matter we want the reader to understand.
• Quote from Daniel Willingham: “Memory is the residue of thought.”
• “Comprehension is essentially changing your understanding of the topic based upon the text.”
• “The more you learn about a topic, the more interested you are in learning more about the topic because you feel comfortable with it.”
• The “simple view of reading” claims that reading comprehension is a two-stage process where you decode/recognise the word and thereby turn print into language; this is followed by turning the meaning of words into the larger meaning of the text. Decoding can be learned over a number of years whereas the language comprehension part is learned over a lifetime. The view has advantages and disadvantages.
• We’re missing a good curriculum “in some cases by focusing in early reading on reading rather than focusing on subject matters to where you can gain the knowledge at the same time as you’re gaining knowledge about reading.”
• Questions teachers can ask to help develop children’s comprehension. (E.g. what are you thinking about? How does this relate to what you already know? What experiences have you had that are related to this?
• Assessing comprehension. It’s not easy to measure!
• “You cannot reduce comprehension down to a single score because it’s not a single thing.”
• Comprehension should be tested within texts on the subject matter upon which children have been provided with instruction.
• Benefits and shortcomings of cloze procedure to test comprehension
• Evaluating psychologist Jerome Kagan’s stance on dyslexia.
• Comparing the neurological basis of dyslexia with someone who has little musical ability.
• There is no consistent brain-based marker for dyslexia.
• The difference between someone who has dyslexia and who does not have dyslexia is evident in how much you struggle to read when provided with quality instruction.
• How dyslexia and comprehension difficulties could co-occur or could occur independently
• Consequences of having dyslexia
• The causes of dyslexia are multi-factorial, some relate to risk and some to resilience
• The probability that a child might have reading problems can be determined before a child has reading problems.
• Dyslexia cannot be diagnosed until the end of first class/beginning of second class.
• Intensive, systematic, supportive and scaffolded instruction from an early stage can help students who are at risk of having dyslexia.
• Having dyslexia is not a categorical phenomenon – it exists on a continuum.
• How he finds time to write.
• He likes the work of Daniel T. Willingham, Tim Shanahan, and Natalie Wexler