Proust and the Squid

From Maryanne Wolf Proust and the Squid

Newly fluent readers learn from Twain's irony and from his powerful images and metaphors to go below the surface of what they read to appreciate the subtext of what the author is trying to convey. For young readers who are moving from simply mastering content to discovering what lies beneath the surface of a text, the literature of fantasy and magic is ideal.

One of the most powerful moments in the reading life, potentially as transformative as Socrates' dialogues, occurs as fluent comprehending readers learn to enter into the lives of imagined heroes and heroines, along the Mississippi or through a wardrobe portal.

Comprehension processes grow impressively in such places as these, where children learn to connect prior knowledge, predict dire or good consequences, draw inferences from every danger-filled corner, monitor gaps in their understanding, and interpret how each new clue, revelation, or added piece of knowledge changes what they know. To practice these skills, they learn to unpeel the layers of meaning in a word, a phrase, or a thought.  That is, in this long phase of reading development, they leave the surface layers of text to explore the wondrous terrain that lies beneath it. The reading expert Richard Vacca describes this shift as a development from "fluent decoders" to "strategic readers" -- "readers who know how to activate prior knowledge before, during, and after reading, to decide what's important in a text, to synthesize information, to draw inferences during and after reading, to ask questions, and to self-monitor and repair faulty comprehension."

Engaging in dialogue with their teachers helps students ask themselves critical questions that get to the essence of what they are reading. For example, in reciprocal teaching, a method introduced by Annemarie Palinscar and Anne Brown, teachers explicitly help students learn to question what they don't understand, summarize the content, identify key issues, clarify, and predict and infer what happens next.  When successful, this variation on the Socratic dialogue provides students with a lifelong approach to extracting meaning from more and more sophisticated text.