Overview:
The viral TikTok of students struggling with a difficult sentence raises legitimate concerns about literacy, but the author argues that an isolated, context-free reading performance on camera is not reliable evidence that students cannot read or comprehend text.
At the end of the last school year, a video went viral showing students struggling to read sentences and explain their meaning.
This video has been viewed and shared tens of millions of times. Videos tend to go viral because they resonate with ideas that lots of people already have. As a society, we have significant concerns with our students’ addiction to screens and how that might be impacting their ability to read. This video seems to confirm a concern about declining student literacy that many adults share. But now that the outrage has died down, we can explore this issue clearly.
But before I do, I want to explore a question:
Why did millions of us, as evidenced by the virality of the video, accept this video as evidence of students’ inability to read?
There is a lot to unpack here.
We have a tendency to look at single cases and use them to speak broadly about a bigger case that we are concerned about.
Let’s be honest about the sentence that was being tested and spend some time breaking down this test sentence.
‘She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche,‘
I consider myself to be of above average literacy; I personally read about 20-30 books a year and have written a book on science education. I can pronounce every word in that sentence, but if you asked me to confidently translate that sentence while I had someone pointing a camera phone at my face, asking me to explain what this sentence meant, I would struggle tremendously.
I am not alone in this. I asked four colleagues of mine, middle school science and English teachers, to read the sentence out loud and explain what it means in plain language. Even without the pressure of a camera in front of their faces, they struggled to articulate its meaning. They could pronounce the words and define the words, but we failed to re-express this sentence in a clear manner. All of us could define the words on our own, but none of us could use that information to explain what the sentence was trying to convey.
If I were reading this sentence in a pulp detective novel, I would be intrigued enough to continue reading. Maybe if “the woman’s gauche appearance betrayed a hint of new money,” I would want to know more. The point is that readers do not read every sentence expecting that every sentence is clear in and of itself – we expect that our uncertainty will clear up as we continue to read.
Explaining an ambiguously worded sentence in a vacuum is something that is difficult for anyone to do. And the particular wording here is very difficult to understand. It is clumsy writing and lacks any kind of context to help us decipher the meaning.
It is concerning that these high school students struggle with words like “extraordinary.” This is not a term that is unusual or out of the norm. Gauche or silhouette are a different story; they are far less commonly used and there is not enough context for someone without that vocabulary in their schema to properly infer its meaning.
I don’t want to suggest that this analysis eliminates concerns about student reading comprehension or that Gen Alpha is just fine when it comes to academic skills. I have lots of concerns about their ability to pay attention and to comprehend concepts. But I do not believe that this video offers broad evidence supporting those concerns.
I think the important takeaway is that reading for understanding is not a performance. Reading for comprehension requires decoding of language, grasping meaning from context, sufficient background knowledge to glean information, and a whole host of other subskills that go into reading. Failing to perform all of that in front of a camera is not actually evidence of an inability to read.
