The Crystal Ball: Predicting Outcomes And Drawing Conclusions

Mature readers always reach beyond the text they are reading. They know unconsciously how to interact with print, regularly uncovering new meanings and making inferential leaps that connect with other thoughts, id s, or experiences. As you saw in the last chapter's discussion of inference, a piece of writing almost always means more than it says, and the awake reader constantly fleshes out suggestions, nuances, and implications to enrich the reading experience. In this and the next chapter, I want to talk with you about some high-order inference skills: predicting outcomes, drawing conclusions, and generalizing. These three skills work together because they involve the reader's ability to follow a trail begun but not completed by the words on the page. The three skills all relate to inferential reasoning in that they require readers to evolve meanings derived from the prose. Remember our definition of inference? When we infer, we uncover information that is unstated—hidden, if you will. The information expands upon the writer's words. Using what the writer tells us, we plug into the complex circuitry of ideas by adducing what's not exactly stated in what we're reading. We dig out meanings, shaping and expanding the writers ideas. Predicting, concluding, and generalizing move us toward wider and deeper meanings in what we read. Let's take them up one at a time. An engaged reader regularly looks ahead to what will happen next—what will be the next event in a chronological sequence, what will be the next point in a logical progression, what will be the next thread in the analytic fabric the writer is weaving. We base our predictions on prior events or issues in the narrative or analytical sequence. Making correct predictions involves our ability to see causes and effects, stimuli and results, actions and consequences. Your child already knows how to predict outcomes. Right from her earliest days in the crib, she has used important analytical skills instinctively.

Words, The Magic Kingdom

When Alice faces the extraordinary Wonderland notions of saying what you mean and meaning what you say, she confronts language's great potential and disappointment. Words should, but do not always, mean what they say; and we who use them do not always produce what we mean. If only we could point to a direct correspondence between each word and only one exact meaning! Reading would simplify in a flash. Ah, but what we might gain in exactness and dazzling clarity, surely we would lose in flexibility, nuance, suggestiveness, and contextual richness. It's good that words have such a wide range of meanings and uses; as such they enrich our capabilities as earths highest life forms and its most competent communicators. Knowing the possibilities of language, understanding the many qualities of words and how our language depends on them, can enhance your child's attempts to determine meaning from print. In the long climb up the mountain to word mastery, a major feature of language that you can help your youngster understand is that words often mean more than they say. Certainly, words have denotative meanings. That is, words have exact definitions that you could check easily in a dictionary. A jeep is a heavy-duty, four-wheeled vehicle. A communist is someone who believes in a social and political system characterized by common ownership and labor organized for the common good. A frigate is a high-speed, medium-sized war vessel of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Yet each of these words has connotative meanings as well. What a word connotes is what it suggests or implies beyond its actual meaning—including the associations and feelings aroused by the word. A jeep is more than a motor vehicle with four-wheel drive; its connection with the military and rugged outdoor life suggests certain associations—rough riding, speed, even danger perhaps. Your son or daughter might like to ride to school in a jeep just for the fun of it, but you'd have 'been puzzled (to say nothing of your parents!) if your date for the senior prom honked the jeep horn outside your front door when he arrived to pick you up.

Finding Secrets: Inference

A colleague arrives at work one Monday morning at 9:30. She's usually there at 8:00 A.M., ahead of everyone else. She mumbles under her breath and shakes her head from side to side, biting her lip. She doesn't say "Hello" as she usually does, but instead, staring straight ahead, she storms past your desk. At her office she turns the knob roughly, throws open the door, and then slams it loudly behind her. What's going on here? This is a classic bad mood scene, isn't it? No direct evidence, of course—your colleague doesn't say anything to you—but you can add up the pieces to figure out some important information for yourself. Clearly, she's angry or upset about something. To reach that judgment, you relied on what you saw and heard at the moment, but also on what you know about her usual behavior. No one had to tell you that she was furious. From her appearance, her actions, her body language, and her behavior, it was safe to infer that something irritated her. You were assessing the scene, and your natural ability to draw inferences fed you information that you needed in order to figure out her behavior. What is inference? When we infer, we derive information by a complex process of reasoning that balances assumptions, induction and deduction, instinct, prior experience, perception, hunches—even, some believe, ESP. Many people define inference as reading between the lines. This definition, of course, is figurative. It says that being able to determine information in this way is like figuring out hidden meanings—beyond the apparent ideas expressed by words and sentences. More information resides on a page of text than what the lines of print say. You can tell from this familiar metaphor—reading between the lines—that inference is usually intertwined with the reading process. In other words, we conceive of the act of inference as print-bound. Much of the essential meaning from a page does come to us as cues and clues in a writer's discourse.

"Just the Facts, Ma'am" : Reading For Information

In the last chapter, we looked at how examining pages before actually reading them provides useful advance preparation for young readers at home. Let's look now at the act of reading itself. How do we get the most out of what we read? Researchers now say that we can best understand what happens when someone reads if we think of reading as a process—a process in which a reader and writer transact information. For the time being, we're going to think of reading exclusively as print-bound. (We'll reconsider this premise later on.) The writer provides words, sentences, and paragraphs. The reader brings to the writer's pages personal experiences and impressions, knowledge of language, individual attitudes, thoughts, and ideas. In reading, both reader and writer engage in a kind of conversation to work out the message together. Not only the writer, but the reader as well, has considerable responsibility in determining meaning. Most enlightened educators no longer regard the old notion of a single, correct, absolute meaning for a piece of writing; readers and writers together shape the ideas captured by the words. The transactional activities involve sophisticated skills, such as what we infer from a reading, what generalizations and conclusions we draw, what judgments we make of the writer's effort—others, too, as you can imagine. We learn the advanced skills as we mature as readers, and I'm going to explore those skills throughout many of the remaining chapters of this book. Yet our ability to reach those more advanced regions of thought rests very much on what we perceive as the writer's essential idea, the nuggets of vital information contained in what we read. In short, we try to see that everything comes together in an answer to this question: "What is the writer trying to say?" Educators usually refer to a reader's basic ability to grasp information—facts, if you will—as literal comprehension. Literal comprehension means understanding the main idea that the writer is trying to convey and knowing the essential details that contribute to and support that main idea.

Mining Word Meanings

Quick now, what's your knee-jerk advice when your child is reading and he asks you the definition of a tough word he can't figure out? "Look it up in a dictionary," right? It's bad advice. It's particularly bad advice for developing readers struggling through a thorny selection and trying to make sense of it. Don't get me wrong—I have nothing against dictionaries. I love dictionaries. They are indispensable language- learning, language-checking tools. Writers, always aiming for precision amid perplexing word choices, could not survive long without dictionaries. For readers, too, dictionaries are important, but not in the ways we typically advise children to use them. Certainly, researchers and very sophisticated readers do use dictionaries as side-by-side companions to books. Watch a thoughtful poetry student reading something by Milton or Housman or Browning and you'll see regular expeditions into a dictionary to check nuances and alternative meanings. For the most part, though, established readers will use a dictionary to check an unfamiliar word after they read a selection and can't figure out the word's meaning. Unfortunately, most classroom dictionary work focuses on having kids look up lists of words. Most often, those words are not connected to any reading exercise; and without a context for word exploration, the activity is an utter waste of time. When the words do relate to content, children are asked to look up the lists of words before reading. Sure, knowing definitions of potentially difficult words can remove some obstacles to comprehension, and I support telling youngsters in advance what a few really difficult or technical key words mean—words whose definitions cannot easily be derived from the context (more on this later) but whose meanings are essential for understanding. Still, you don't want your child slaving over a list of tough words, looking them up and writing definitions, as a necessary precursor to a reading activity. He'll be bored and exhausted by the time he starts the first sentence! In fact, most of us don't often take the advice we give freely to our children.

Introduction :Your Child Can Read Better With Your Help

Today’s parents have a lively interest in. assisting their children as learners, and this interest has spawned a plethora of books on home reading programs. It's natural to raise this question, then: why yet another book for helping children read at home? Surely the bookstore and library shelves are groaning with volumes that can help you create a "home schoolroom," enough to produce a nation of advanced readers. Why yet another book? For good reasons, believe me. Obviously, most parents want to help their children learn. A couple of years ago, Professor Joyce Epstei at Johns Hopkins surveyed the parents of more than 250 Baltimore children. Her findings, reported in The New York Times, showed that kids had higher reading scores if parents supported their youngsters' efforts at home. What's even more interesting is that although mothers and fathers wanted to involve themselves actively in their children's learning, very few knew just what to do. A shocking eighty per cent reported that they didn't have a clue about where to begin in helping their children succeed in school. With this apparent insecurity, many moms and dads are reaching for books in an effort to learn what they don't know. Hence, all the how-to-helpyour- child read productions. However, unlike Any Child Can Read Better, most "home learning" books address parents of toddlers and preschoolers and attempt to create a race of superkids who can read almost before they can walk. Teach-your-child- to-read books concentrate on turning the home nursery into a classroom—reading drills with flash cards, oversized words pinned as labels on familiar objects, interminable sessions on alphabet skills, phonetics, sight vocabulary, and sounding-out words. Too many books for parents of young learners have turned on the pressure and have turned off the pleasure for mothers and fathers as guiders and shapers of learning experiences. Moms and dads are not drill sergeants. Home isn't boot camp. If you're the mother or father of a preschooler, unless you're home learning parents who won't send your children to school in any case, don't teach your son or daughter how to read.

Words and Pictures : Using Visual Aids

I want you to expand your definition of reading. Most people define the word literally: Reading is determining meaning from printed words and sentences. But I believe that that's too limited a definition. We're always trying to "read" meanings from our physical environments, even when no print is involved. (It's interesting to note the legitimate, though certainly metaphorical, use of the word read for actions beyond a page of text.) The point to remember here is that the same skills that we use for a printed page we often apply to nonprint experiences as well. Thus when you try to "read" any situation, you aim to extract meaning from it. However, the connection between reading print and reading the surrounding world is more than a metaphorical one. The roster of skills in the table of contents for this book, Any Child Can Read Better—figuring out the main point, inferring, predicting outcomes, generalizing— are the intellectual processes we use almost everywhere to decipher meanings throughout the day. As I explain those skills and how to help your son or daughter use them, I'll be showing you the connections you can make between print and nonprint situations. You'll be able to help your child apply to words on a page some of the same mental activities that she draws on to interpret her daily life. When your child sees a group of youngsters waiting at the school bus, or when she watches an episode of Captain Kangaroo, or when she looks at a photograph or a cartoon or an advertisement—as soon as she tries to figure out what's going on, she's reading. Shakespeare reminds us that all the world's a stage; but it's also a book. As you know, I've been making frequent connections all along between the print world and the world of nonprint experiences that your child tries to read (that word again!) each day. In this chapter I want to concentrate on some of the representational forms that youngsters meet regularly in their lives. By representational I mean all those elements that stand for, or represent, experience.

Faraway Views : Generalizing

It's been a rough Tuesday, especially in your dealings with teenagers. A mother of two young kids yourself, you expect a modicum of respect from kids ten, fifteen, or twenty years younger than you are. But today, no such luck. In Stop 'n Shop a nineteen year old stock boy packing apple sauce jars nearly knocks you over as he hoists a huge carton from a dolly to the floor. Of course, he gives you no apology. At Burger King, the order taker sneers at you when you present a fifty dollar bill; she mumbles a snide remark under her breath about your confusing a fast food store with a bank. The gas jockey at a new Exxon station gives you fifteen dollars' worth of premium when you ordered ten dollars' worth of regular and zealously begins a shouting match, demanding that you pay up because you should have been sure that he heard what you wanted. A few other similar experiences have set your teeth on edge. Kids, you grumble. Deteriorating in manners. No good, today's generation. No respect for their elders. Self-centered. Care only about their own needs and feelings. If you can remember formulating principles like these or others like them, congratulate yourself as a highorder thinker. Even though the thoughts themselves might result from unhappy experiences, you've used your good brain power to establish a broader context for your experiences. Go ahead and pat yourself on the back! What you've done is to exercise another major strategy that marks mature thought: generalizing. The ability to generalize helps you interpret your surroundings and helps you probe deeper meanings from it. It allows you to see relations between specific circumstances and more abstract conditions. Psychologists say that the process of generalizing is a process of discovery; when you see similar elements in diverse circumstances you take a conceptual leap forward in your thinking. To some, one of the primary goals of education is to create thinkers who know how to generalize.

Reading Warm-Ups

I've told you that this book will help you help your child be a better reader. After our discussion of the power and glory of words, you're probably expecting me to gun the accelerator across the vast reading roadways beckoning your son or daughter. But no, not yet. We're still not ready to talk about reading as you probably think of it, the moment that your youngster opens a science or social studies or "reading" book and starts her journey through the pages. Why the delay? We have some troubleshooting to do. You have to be able to prepare for those times at home when your guidance can improve comprehension dramatically. You have to stimulate your child to read with the highest possible degree of attention and to get the most from his or her print experience with minimal frustration. To reach those goals, before we do anything else we need to talk about warm-up activities, essential but often neglected areas of reading's domain. Warm-up is a familiar phrase: When you warm up, you prepare to achieve something you want to do well. Runners push against a fence or wall to stretch their muscles before an early morning jog. Pitchers toss a few practice shots before flinging the first ball to the opposing batter. On land swimmers shake their arms and wriggle their legs before taking the big plunge. Mentally, competitive athletes warm up by "imaging," a technique in which they picture all the details of the upcoming meet, project themselves into it, and try to feel all the attendant sensory responses. Warming up is as important and as useful an activity for readers as it is for exercisers and athletes. The warmup session is one that teachers pay little attention to at school; although they may show the whole class some of the strategies I'm about to recommend, they don't often help children apply some of these warm-up techniques on their own.

Moms and Dads as Reading Helpers :Good Books Through The Grades

Read some chilling statistics, reported in an accurate Roper Organization survey a short time ago. Pollsters telephoned a nationally representative cross section of 1,000 families with kids from three to fourteen years old. Over ninety percent of moms and dads said reading was essential to their boy or girl's success. But of those with a child who could read, only 66 percent were happy with how their youngster was reading. According to age group, these are the numbers regarding parents who thought their child was interested in reading: . . .SCHOOL LEVEL PERCENTAGE Preschool 56% Kindergarten-second grade 59% Third grade-fifth grade 53% Beyond fifth grade 39%. . . At best, therefore, according to parents, six out of ten youngsters in any of the four groups found books stimulating. Of all the families surveyed only forty-four percent said their children read for pleasure each day. The implications are astounding. Personal happiness, future education, good jobs, enlightened citizenry, the society's continued advance: these all are at stake. Looking beyond the elementary and junior high school years, a Carnegie Foundation survey of 5500 college professors revealed that 75% think undergraduates at their institutions are seriously underprepared in basic skills; 66% think their colleges are paying too much money and spending too much time teaching what students should have learned prior to college admission. The failure of our schools to develop essential skills, the pervasive indifference to books among our children, the minimal achievement level at which so many youngsters hover throughout their educational lives—these are grim barriers to knowledge, happiness, and success. We read about this new study, that commission's report, those irrefutable data. We worry for awhile and then shrug with resignation. I'm not hopeful that the depressing statistics we hear about so regularly will improve any time soon, no matter what changes we make in our country's formal educational system. But in the informal realm;—the home, the supermarket, the playground, the various child-parent intersections—fertile, untilled soil stretches out around us.