The Hidden Skills Behind Reading, Writing and Learning

There is a point in a child's education when knowing how to read is no longer enough.

As students move into upper elementary and middle school, the language demands of school increase dramatically. They are expected to understand increasingly complex directions, learn unfamiliar vocabulary, remember what they have read, explain their thinking, and use information from a text to support an answer.

These skills can be easy to overlook because they don't always look like a traditional “language problem.”

Recently, I was working with a student on a science assignment that asked them to identify and explain vocabulary terms. Before we could even get to the science content, the student stopped and asked:

¨What does define mean?” The student wasn't struggling with the science concept. The problem was that the language of the assignment itself was getting in the way.

This is an important distinction.

A student may know the information but struggle to understand what the question is asking them to do. Words such as define, describe, explain, compare, justify, identify, and analyze carry very specific academic expectations. If those words aren't understood and readily retrieved, completing an assignment independently becomes much harder.

Reading comprehension isn't just remembering the story.

As school becomes more language-heavy, students also need to be able to retrieve information from text when they need it. For example, a student might read a passage about the causes of the American Revolution and understand it while reading. Later, they are asked:

“What evidence from the text supports your answer?”

Now they have to go back into that mental representation of the text, locate relevant information, determine what actually supports their answer, and retrieve or find that evidence. That skill doesn't belong only to ELA.

A science student may need to explain which evidence supports a hypothesis.

A social studies student may need to identify evidence that supports a claim about a historical event.

A math student may need to explain how they know their solution is correct, using information from the problem.

In each case, the student isn't simply being asked whether they understood what they read. They are being asked to retrieve, organize, and use language from what they read.

This is where language and learning intersect. When a student struggles with following directions, academic vocabulary, recalling information from text, finding evidence, or putting an answer into a complete written response, the problem isn't necessarily motivation or effort.

Sometimes there is a language component underneath the struggle.

And because these demands become increasingly important in middle school, difficulties that were subtle in earlier grades can suddenly become much more noticeable.

Students don't necessarily need to be struggling with the mechanics of reading to need support with the language of learning.

Understanding that distinction can help parents and educators recognize when a child may need something beyond more time, more practice, or another worksheet.

Sometimes the missing piece is the language required to access what they already know.