To be sure, decoding readers are skittish, young, and just beginning to learn how to use their expanding knowledge of language and their growing powers of inference to figure out a text. The neuroscientist Laurie Cutting of John Hopkins explains some nonlinguistic skills that contribute to the development of reading comprehension in these children: for example, how well they can enlist key executive functions such as working memory and comprehension skills such as inference and analogy. Working memory provides children with a kind of temporary space for holding information about letters and words, just long enough so that the brain can connect it to the children's increasingly sophisticated conceptual information.
As decoding readers progress, their comprehension becomes inextricably bound to these executive processes, and to what they know about words and to fluency. They are all related. Incremental increases in fluency allow for inference making, because there is added time for inferences and insights. Fluency does not ensure better comprehension; rather, fluency gives enough extra time to the executive system to direct attention where it is most needed to infer, to understand, to predict, or sometimes to repair discordant understanding and to interpret a meaning afresh. For example, in Charlotte's Web a decoding reader must realize what Wilbur's fate would be without Charlotte's intervention.
But what prepares the child to comprehend the splendidly sophisticated arachnoid reasoning behind this intervention? This phase of reading marks the time when the young child begins to learn how to predict from the delicate mix of what is said in a text and what is not said . It is the moment when children first learn to go “beyond th information given.” It is the beginning of what will ultimately be the most important contribution of the reading brain: time to think.
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