Why reading comprehension is collapsing: “Children arrive who only know 20 words”

PalmaThere are children who know how to read, but do not know how to explain what they have read. They can pronounce the words of a text and reach the end of the page, but when the teacher asks them what that which they have just read means, the answer does not come. It is a scene that teachers consulted by ARA Balears claim to find more and more often in classrooms and which helps to understand a piece of data that is hard to forget: the Balearic Islands have lost 31 points in reading comprehension in the PISA tests, from the 472 of the previous edition to the current 441. The decline does not speak only of books. Reading comprehension is the ability to understand a text, relate its information, make inferences and draw conclusions from it. And, according to the teachers and professors consulted, the difficulties begin long before a student has a PISA text in front of them. They begin when they do not yet know how to read.

This is one of the ideas that is most repeated among teachers: the starting point for children has changed. Joana Maria Mas, director of CEIP Ses Rotes Velles, recalls that when she started working in Early Childhood Education, it was common for children to arrive at Primary School with a good part of the reading and writing process achieved. At home there were more books, more stories were told, and at school, daily routines served to familiarize children with written language.

“They used to be Olympians, compared to those of today,” she summarizes to describe the difference she perceives in the classrooms. It is not just a question of knowing letters. Mas explains that now children arrive at Early Childhood Education with difficulties in maturation, autonomy, and language. This forces the delay of learning that could previously be started earlier. "If a child does not have enough vocabulary, does not understand instructions well, or is not capable of maintaining attention, teaching them to read and write becomes a much more complicated task," she says.

Meager vocabulary

Marga Llull, a teacher at the CEIPIEEM Simó Ballester in Manacor, gives an especially graphic example. At the center, they have detected three-year-old children arriving with a very limited vocabulary. “There are children who only know 20 words. What is the point of giving a pencil to a three-year-old child if they haven't built oral language?”, she poses. For Llull, the sequence is clear: first, it is necessary to build oral language, comprehension, vocabulary, listening capacity, and autonomy; then, on this foundation, one can advance towards reading and writing. “We cannot skip stages,” she argues. The center works from preschool on oral comprehension, expression, auditory discrimination, and phonological awareness. In primary school, students participate in language workshops to work on fluency, comprehension, and reading habits.

What happens in preschool reappears later in primary school. Mas explains that in his classrooms there may be 25 students with a book in front of them, of which about 10 are capable of looking at it or reading it, but cannot explain what it is about. "These don't understand and the rest simply don't read," he summarizes.

At the CEIP Melcior Rosselló i Simonet, Raül Abril has also confirmed this inequality. After years of teaching English, last year he switched to tutoring in the fifth grade of primary school. And he found a very unequal reality within the same class: some students read long books without difficulty and others, even in the sixth grade of primary school, have problems reading and understanding half a page. The difference, according to Abril, has a lot to do with what happens outside of school. Children who have more contact with books and reading tend to arrive with more tools, while those who do not have this stimulus accumulate difficulties. "And you, in class, do what you can," he summarizes.

At school, they have had to diversify their strategies. They do dramatic readings, paired readings, and specific exercises to work on visual attention. In one of the activities, students have to locate words of a certain color within a text, with the aim of training eyes that, according to the teacher, are not so used to following a whole page. Screens are part of this change, but teachers avoid reducing the entire explanation to them. What they do observe is that children are used to much faster stimuli. Mas explains that many students spend hours with mobile phones, tablets, consoles, and video games and that later they find it hard to listen to an explanation or maintain attention in front of a text.

When they reach secondary school, these difficulties are already more visible. The Catalan teacher at IES Sineu, Catalina Pericàs, has verified this this year with the initial reading comprehension tests for students moving from first to second year of ESO. In a group of 27 students, only 5 or 6 obtained good or very good results. In another, of 26, 5 achieved a high mark and the rest moved around the passing grade or remained below it: 4.5, 3.8, 4.4, 3.4 or 4.1.

Not even simple texts

They were not particularly complex tests. The text was about the 'Much' festivities and the questions were basic. But there was not a single 10. The problem, Pericàs explains, goes beyond knowing how to find information: "You have to understand, maintain attention, relate ideas and make a sustained effort, and they don't know how," she laments. Pericàs knows that reading is not built only at school. She explains herself that as a child she was not a great reader, despite having books at home. And today she sees that, in many families, parents know that their children should read more, but they acknowledge that they themselves do not have much of a reading habit either. Some even carry a bad memory of compulsory school readings. The high school has decided to intervene with specific reading time. Every day, from 8:00 to 8:15 a.m., students must read a book. On Fridays, it is the teacher who reads a text and then works on it with the group. The school also wants to incorporate readings from Biology, Mathematics and other subjects so that comprehension is not only the responsibility of the language faculty.

The paradox is that books continue to sell. Marta Jover, owner of the children's bookstore La Il·lustrada, in Manacor, explains that sales have not fallen in general. Between the ages of 0 and 9, they are even growing. Youth literature, especially fantasy and romantic stories, also has good sales. The big gap appears, precisely, between the ages of 9 and 13 or 14. It is the moment when many children abandon reading. Jover explains that the type of books published for these ages has also changed: more dialogue, shorter sentences, and fewer descriptions. "Everything is more worn out," she explains.

Children are more exposed to books at certain stages, but less accustomed to sustaining demanding reading. A narrative with descriptions, which forces one to imagine a space, remember a character, or follow a plot over many pages, requires a different type of attention than that of short messages and immediate stimuli. Jover herself explains that she recommends families introduce books from a young age so that contact with reading creates a habit. But she also sees how this habit is lost, especially in pre-adolescence. It is precisely the stage in which reading ceases to be just learning to read and begins to require deeper understanding, perseverance, and the ability to maintain attention.

The PISA decline cannot be explained by a single cause. Teachers speak of a change in the linguistic development of some children, a delay in literacy, less vocabulary and attention span, inequalities between families, and a much greater exposure to digital stimuli. And, at the same time, schools try to compensate for this by recovering time to read, working on comprehension from the earliest stages, and seeking ways for students to regain their attention span when facing a text.

Because the problem that teachers describe is not simply that students read less. It is that some arrive at reading without having yet built the necessary tools to understand it. And this begins long before PISA: in a three-year-old child who cannot yet hold a conversation, in a primary school student who finishes a book but cannot explain it, and in an adolescent who can read a text but does not understand its inferences. The final result ends up appearing, years later, in a reading test with dismal results that were, in reality, the chronicle of an announced catastrophe.