The missing piece of reading comprehension - Theory of Mind

In the opening scene of Paul Jennings’ ‘The Gizmo’, the young protagonist is contemplating stealing from a market stall…

‘I don’t want to take anything.  But I promised.  And Floggit will tell the kids at school that I winmped out.  Broke my word.  I couldn’t let that happen.  No way.’

On the face of it, as we read, we may feel, ‘so just don’t take it then.  Just walk away. That’s what I’d do.’  But even if we do feel that we understand his perspective and his dilemma even if we would act differently.  We understand peer-pressure, particularly as it pertains to young adults, also the desire to get something for nothing and to prove ourselves to others.  We are in essence monitoring the mental and emotional state of an invented character who may act and react in ways different to our own.

So as the skilled reader absorbs the text, they are engaged in multifaceted and complex cognitive gymnastics (Scarborough, 2001).  They have to decode the words with sufficient fluency to enable sense to be made from them and attend to the story rather than the decoding (Gough and Tunmer, 1986; Kim et al., 2012).  They have to apply their language and vocabulary knowledge to ensure they understand the meaning of what is written (Oullette and Beers, 2010).  They have to apply their background knowledge to situate the narrative in a relevant schematic framework to make sense of the situation.  They have to infer the elements that Paul Jennings leaves out because he assumes the reader knows and understands them (Kendeou et al., 2012) and they have to be motivated enough to persist with reading knowing that stories don’t conclude until the end…which may be some way off (Guthrie et al. 2007).  And all of this has to happen simultaneously.  Phew!  It’s any wonder reading comprehension is so complex, because it’s not merely about decoding or extracting meaning, it’s also about constructing meaning (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002).

And yet, even when pupils become skilled and fluent word readers, with good vocabularies, highly motivated and with excellent background knowledge, there are still significant variances between their comprehension (Foorman et al., 2015) that seem to become more pronounced as they get older.  There is clearly something else at play.  We still have pupils whose reading comprehension stalls around year 4/5 (Dore et al., 2018).

So, if we circle back to the opening scene, it appears there might be something missing here.  If we are also constructing meaning from the written language (as well as extracting meaning), where in the above framework of comprehension is the expectation that we as readers can interpret and imagine what the young protagonist is thinking and feeling even though they may have a different perspective to our own – one we may have no sympathy for but one that we can understand.  Skilled readers appear to monitor characters’ mental conditions routinely forming mental representations of their emotional states – they expect a character to feel guilt when their actions adversely affect another character.  Indeed, skilled readers take longer to process a sentence where the character behaves inconsistently (Dore et al., 2018) – as Thomas Hardy advised, "the uncommonness must be in the events, not in the characters".

Understanding that other people have different emotional drivers and that two people may perceive the same situation differently is not inherent.  We develop this Theory of Mind over time with most 4 year olds able to understand that others may have different visual perspectives of the world, and by 5 years old most children are able to reason about others’ mental states with the understanding associated with mixed emotions and non-literal situations not developing until 7 or 8 years old.  What is interesting according to Rebecca Dore and her team (2018), is that these thresholds seem to correspond to our narrative processing abilities.  So very young children can track characters’ spatial movements and then at 4/5 they can track characters’ mental perspectives and thoughts with more advanced tracking of mental states, emotions and goals not developing until 7 years old.

This link between Theory of Mind (the understanding that other people have mental states that drive their actions) and reading comprehension appeared to be confirmed by a longitudinal study carried out at the University of Reading (Atkinson et al., 2017) that followed 80 children for two and half years.  Their findings suggested that Theory of Mind development at four years old directly predicted reading comprehension at six years old. The authors suggested that Theory of Mind not only supports reading comprehension indirectly by facilitating language but directly contributes to it beyond the linguistic comprehension situated within The Simple View of Reading (Gough and Tunmer, 1986).  They further suggest that Theory of Mind development supports the metacognitive development so crucial for the development of reading comprehension.

Thus, the inclusion of Theory of Mind development in models of reading comprehension seems invaluable as a predictor of reading development and, as Dore and her colleagues suggest, may be the missing piece in the jigsaw that explains the variances of pupils with similar other comprehension development.  But this leaves one hanging question: is it merely an indicator of comprehension development or can it be a driver of comprehension development?

There are some positive indications.  Studies have indicated a correlation between reading and exposure to books and development of ‘Theory of Mind’ (Mar et al., 2006 and 2010; Mar and Oatley, 2008) with some limited indications of causation (Lysaker et al., 2011).  There is, of course, the chicken and egg problem – did Theory of Mind develop because of the reading or did the reading develop because of the Theory of Mind?  And it is important to note that Theory of Mind developed with only narrative texts and not expository texts (which were a negative indicator).  What seems clear though, is that texts (whether read by or read to) that expose pupils to social imagination and develop Theory of Mind will do no harm to their ability to comprehend narratives and may do much good.