Reading Comprehension Instruction
in the Primary Grades
Beth Ann Drinker
Simmons College
Reading 433
April 2005
For several years the focus of reading research at the primary level has been on the
importance of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. This is relevant to reading
comprehension because strong lexical processing abilities free readers’ attention and memory for
higher level comprehension tasks. Still, several researchers agree that comprehension instruction
itself should occupy a prominent place alongside phonics instruction in the early grades. It is not
clear what that instruction should look like. The majority of reading comprehension research starts
at grade three, the point at which children are assumed to be reading fluently enough to comprehend
text. Because there is a significant shift in children’s cognitive abilities at this age, however, one
cannot assume that reading comprehension instruction that is effective at the upper elementary
grades will work at the primary level. A plan for the youngest elementary students must start with
both an understanding of their unique characteristics and a vision of what mature reading
comprehension looks like.
In this paper I describe readers at both points on this continuum: specifically, five- to sevenyear olds who are still developing the linguistic and cognitive abilities that underlie reading
comprehension, and proficient adult readers who use these abilities strategically to understand text.
I turn to Carol Westby (Westby, 1999) and Isabel Beck (Beck, 2001) to provide insights about the
nature of the novice group, and Paul Whitney (Whitney, 1998) to characterize the experts. As I
contrast how these readers make meaning from text, I map out objectives for reading
comprehension instruction in the early grades: strengthening students’ linguistic and cognitive
abilities so that they can eventually use them in flexible and complex ways to construct meaning
from text. Drawing upon the work of Westby and Beck, as well as David Pearson and Nell Duke
(Pearson & Duke 2002), and Carol Smolkin and Carol Donovan (Smolkin & Donovan 2002), I
provide examples of instructional approaches to reading discussions, as well as other aspects of
classroom life, designed to meet these objectives. I then consider the value of explicit strategy
instruction and comprehension acquisition instruction in a reading program at this level. I conclude
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that reading comprehension instruction looks somewhat different in the primary grades due to the
developmental characteristics of young learners, but clearly has an important role in creating
thoughtful, strategic readers.
Carol Westby describes the linguistic and cognitive abilities of children in the early
elementary years as they relate to reading. First, she identifies the precursors to children’s
understanding of a literate language style, one that includes advanced vocabulary and complex
sentence structures. These are found in the symbolic play of children even before age five when
they use explicit and elaborative language to explain their pretenses and guide their actions. They
are novices, however, at understanding new vocabulary, complex sentence structures, and
decontextualized language as related to reading. The second characteristic of children that pertains
to reading comprehension is their cognitive ability to acquire and possess ever-increasing world
knowledge, including knowledge of both the physical and social world. This is facilitated by a third
cognitive ability, the capacity to organize knowledge in terms of conceptual relationships,
especially of time and cause/effect. These concepts eventually develop into content schemas that, in
turn, are elaborated and strengthened as children acquire new knowledge. Content schemas are also
shaped by developmental factors, such as an understanding of cause and effect as a series of
automatically occurring events at age five and a more complex understanding of psychological and
physical causality by age seven. Content schemas provide the foundation for narrative and (later)
expository text schemas. Finally, Westby describes children’s developing cognitive ability to plan
for and monitor their thoughts and actions. From very early on, children use language to help
themselves plan and monitor their play, but it is only near the end of this transitional phase that
most children possess a theory of mind—an awareness that their thoughts and mental states exist
and are not the same as external acts or events. They begin to have a sense that remembering,
forgetting, knowing, and guessing are processes under their control. Westby argues that until
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students have this metacognitive awareness, their understanding of causality in narrative texts, and
their ability to plan and monitor their own comprehension, will be limited.
Whereas Westby devotes considerable attention to the cognitive processes associated with
using world knowledge, schema, and metacognition, Beck is most concerned about how young
children interact with the text itself, their linguistic abilities. In her characterization of thinking at
this age, children have a natural tendency to rely on non-linguistic information such as background
knowledge and pictures to understand stories. This interferes with the primary task of becoming
competent with decontextualized text. Further interference comes from their limited ability to
retrieve relevant background knowledge and suppress discrepant or distracting information. In
Beck’s view, other cognitive abilities contribute to comprehension, but it is children’s facility with
decontextualized language that determines their ultimate success in reading.
This significant difference in emphasis between Westby and Beck is echoed in Whitney’s
explication of the constructivist and minimalist views of reading comprehension. Like Westby,
Whitney conceptualizes reading comprehension as the ability to identify relationships between ideas
in the text. These connections must be made at both the local level (between adjacent sentences)
and the global level (in relation to a theme). The constructivist view highlights the role of world
knowledge in making these connections, while the minimalist view emphasizes the primacy of text
for readers. Whitney describes how proficient readers construct meaning in both ways. By relating
his analysis of this process to Westby’s and Beck’s descriptions of young readers, one begins to
understand how reading comprehension emerges over time, and what conditions might foster it.
At the local level, efficient readers maintain coherence by relying primarily on semantic and
syntactic clues to understand referents such as noun phrase anaphors and pronouns. For example,
readers use knowledge of synonyms, category terms, gender and number aspects of pronouns, as
well as sensitivity to foregrounding by the writer to make connections between sentences. From
this minimalist perspective, readers stick closely to the text to maintain local coherence and retrieve
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from memory only the amount of information necessary to make connections. At the global level,
readers use general knowledge of cause and effect relationships to make these logical inferences,
constructing meaning as they connect these schemas to the text. Even within a constructivist
framework, skilled readers only retrieve the information they need and have the ability to suppress
irrelevant information and connections.
The use of these strategies—nearly undetectable in proficient readers—involves precisely
the kind of thinking Beck’s Text Talk approach to read-alouds asks of children. For Beck, the
purpose of instruction is to move children from using non-linguistic methods of understanding text
to constructing meaning the way the minimalists’ mature readers do, primarily from the words on
the page. Beck’s choice of books with complex sentence structures and challenging vocabulary
requires students to grapple with maintaining local coherence by encountering devices such as
pronouns and noun phrase anaphors. In addition, the emphasis on tier two vocabulary instruction
broadens the knowledge base for identifying referents and primes the mind for establishing global
coherence by evoking key themes. During discussion, background knowledge is elicited
judiciously and its use is carefully scaffolded to keep the focus on the text; this mirrors the efficient
processes of proficient readers as described by Whitney. The objective of such instruction is
primarily the development of strong linguistic abilities that will enable children to apply these
mature strategies to texts independently.
Whitney makes it clear, however, that even at the level of local coherence readers must
sometimes use general knowledge to find an antecedent. Readers often do this to establish a causal
relationship between sentences when one is not clear. This can be difficult for young readers,
following Westby’s thinking, if they lack an adequate content schema related to the text or have not
yet developed the reasoning skills to infer the psychological or physical cause of an event. Within
narrative text in particular, the cause of a character’s action may remain unknown to a child whose
lack of metacognition makes it difficult to recognize a character’s psychological state. Such a child
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may be unaware that there is a causal connection, and so does not seek the antecedent at all.
Because understanding these relationships-- particularly cause/effect--constitutes reading
comprehension, three important objectives of a primary level reading program are to develop the
cognitive abilities listed previously: acquiring and possessing world knowledge, organizing
information into schemas, and recognizing the “landscape of consciousness.” These stand
alongside the goal of developing children’s linguistic skills.
Implications for instruction
A comprehensive plan for reading comprehension develops multiple aspects of each ability.
Beginning with a discussion of the linguistic abilities of students, this is consistent with Westby’s
initial argument that oral and written language competence goes hand-in-hand, one supporting the
other as children develop. Beck’s Text Talk is one structure that provides experience with literate
language styles, both as children listen to stories and as they practice using elaborative language to
discuss them. Like Beck, Westby advocates searching out books with challenging vocabulary and
complex structures, then structuring opportunities for children to grapple with these features in the
social context of class discussion. Westby goes farther, however, suggesting that teachers plan
sharing time and imaginative play periods so that children can practice using decontextualized
language. Children would then have multiple opportunities each day to hear and use literate
language in diverse contexts.
Whitney’s analysis of mature reading strategies also makes clear that reading
comprehension requires the cognitive ability to access and organize world knowledge. Although
Whitney states that a lack of knowledge is rarely the primary cause of poor comprehension in
adults, for young readers, particularly those from limited backgrounds, it is crucial to provide
experiences that enrich their knowledge base. These experiences become grist for the mill when
they are accompanied by activities that promote the construction of rich content schema, and
eventually text schema. Westby explains why this is important:
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Narrative structure arises from understanding conceptual relationships. Consequently, one
does not teach the structure, but instead, one facilitates students’ comprehension by giving
them experiences with domain-specific and world knowledge that underlie any particular
structure. (p. 194)
This is radically different from the top-down teaching of story grammar that is part of many
teachers’ repertoires for teaching reading comprehension. She implies here that the opportunity to
construct text schema is at least as powerful—perhaps more so—than explicit strategy instruction.
Westby goes on to suggest series of questions, book report forms, and specific genres of literature
that provide text-based ways for children to build schema sequentially, according to their stages of
development.
Finally, Whitney explains that discourse processing is both complex and flexible, varying
according to the content and the context of the reading task. This requires the metacognitive ability
to plan for and monitor one’s understanding of the text. Teachers model this for students when they
provide “think-alouds” in conjunction with their “read-alouds” and when they ask appropriate
questions about texts. Teaching strategies such as DRTA (Directed Reading Thinking Activity)
provide a structure for this questioning. Transactional Strategy Instruction (TSI) might also be
included within this group of approaches because of its emphasis on teaching children when to use
specific strategies. Westby again advocates for providing real world experiences, this time to build
children’s ability to plan and control their actions before asking them to monitor their text
comprehension. Symbolic play offers one opportunity for children to spontaneously use planning
strategies with peers. Students should regularly be given responsibility to plan and carry out
various classroom tasks, first with assistance from their teacher, but eventually on their own.
Students can also be taught a generic sequence of steps for completing classroom projects with the
expectation that they will internalize them in time. Again, the diverse and multiple opportunities to
develop a cognitive ability, this time metacognition, allow children to generalize these skills to
other contexts.
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Students who have developed all these linguistic and cognitive abilities are still not fullyequipped to become proficient readers. They must use these abilities in conjunction with
appropriate reading strategies. Strategies, in this context, mean techniques to control their reading
comprehension. A student may have the ability to organize a content schema around blizzards, for
instance, but unless she can visualize the blinding snow that swirls around Pa as he clings to a rope
strung between the house and the barn, she cannot fully appreciate the themes of survival and selfsufficiency that run through all the Little House on the Prairie books. Conversely, a student who
knows to ask questions as she reads may be at a loss as to what to ask if she has no expository text
schema for cause/effect and is confronted with an analysis of meteorological events leading up to
the Blizzard of ‘78. Yet strategy use implies the ability to control and plan one’s thinking, leading
researchers to question whether or not strategy instruction is appropriate for children in this five- to
seven-year old stage. Little research on reading comprehension at this age is available, and much of
what exists was done with second graders, students whose theory of mind is nearly developed.
Nonetheless, Pearson is able to cite three studies of kindergarten to second grade students
that support his contention that explicit strategy instruction is effective at this age. The first two
studies involved children in guided retellings of narratives, with a focus on teaching story
elements—essentially training in developing narrative text schema. This instructional approach was
valuable, as proven by the excellent retellings of students during the assessment period, but it is
debatable that it qualifies as explicit strategy instruction since it did not teach children a method to
control or monitor their comprehension. This distinction is important if one want to generalize
these examples to mean primary students are prepared for instruction in comprehension strategies.
Knowledge of text schemas is not a strategy: Westby contends that it arises from a cognitive ability
to understand conceptual relationships. Knowing to evoke a schema to understand a text is a
strategy; it is the knowing to use it that is difficult for students in this age group.
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It is significant, however, that the third study Pearson cites examined the effectiveness of a
TSI approach in second grade. The approach is quite complex, involving explicit instruction,
modeling, and discussion to teach comprehension strategies. Students are also taught to apply the
strategies differently depending on the nature and context of the reading task. Given the demands
on memory, metacognition, and multi-dimensional thinking, the success of this approach with
young students is unexpected. It would be worth a closer look at how the elements of this model
worked together to facilitate such growth.
Smolkin and Donovan also explore the history of this issue, citing several researchers over
the last twenty years who found explicit strategy instruction for young children did not result in
long term gains. Clearly this is an area for further research, but if the effectiveness of explicit
strategy instruction at younger ages is in doubt, then what are the alternatives for reading
comprehension instruction in the primary grades? Smolkin and Donovan put forth a model for
“comprehension acquisition instruction” that they find most appropriate for children in this
transitional period. In this model children’s cognition is shaped through exposures to models and
practice in social groups. The two critical elements of this approach are a carefully-crafted social
context for learning and a variety of contexts for practice. Both these elements are reflected the
suggestions from Westby for developing linguistic and cognitive abilities during reading times and
throughout the school day. And like Beck, Smolkin and Donovan present a model for read aloud
instruction that places the teacher at the center of the social context for comprehension instruction,
where her role is to focus, model, and scaffold interactions with the linguistic content of the text.
Unlike Beck, these researchers advocate for the inclusion of more informational texts in order to
challenge children’s reasoning abilities with a greater range of text structures and new concepts.
It is clear that comprehension instruction should be an integral part of the primary-grade
curriculum. The discussion of challenging, engaging texts is at the heart of such a program, but
teachers must also plan other opportunities throughout the day for children to acquire facility with
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language, world knowledge, text knowledge, and self-monitoring. Developing these key linguistic
and cognitive abilities is the primary objective of early comprehension instruction. Because the
fourth ability, metacognition, is nascent at this age, the explicit instruction of reading
comprehension strategies may not be as effective as it is in later grades. Once children have those
strategies, however, along with a strong linguistic and cognitive foundation, they will have the
capability to understand increasingly complex texts.
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REFERENCES
Beck, I. L. & McKeown, M.G. (September 2001). Text talk: Capturing the benefits of read-aloud
experiences for young children. The Reading Teacher, 55(1), 10-20.
Pearson, D.P. & Duke, N.K. (2002). Comprehension instruction in the primary grades. In C.C.
Block & M. Pressley (Eds.), Comprehension instruction: Research-based practices (pp. 247-258).
New York: The Guilford Press.
Smolkin, L.B. & Donovan, C.A. (2002). “Oh excellent, excellent question”: Developmental
differences and comprehension acquisition. In C.C. Block & M. Pressley (Eds.), Comprehension
instruction: Research-based practices (pp. 140-157). New York: The Guilford Press.
Westby, C. (1999). Assessing and Facilitating Text Comprehension Problems. In H.W. Catts & A.
Kamhi (Eds.), Language and Reading Disabilities (pp. 154-221). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Whitney, P. (1998). Understanding and Remembering Discourse. In The Psychology of Language
(pp. 234-248). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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