How to Do Things With Texts: A Functional Account of Reading Comprehension.
Define reading comprehension by the reader’s observable actions and the social feedback that follows, not by guessing what happens inside the head.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Flores et al. (2020) wrote a theory paper. They ask: what is reading comprehension, really?
Instead of looking inside the head, they map the give-and-take between reader, text, and social scene.
What they found
The authors say comprehension is not a private picture in the brain. It is the reader’s whole chain of actions—questions, nods, page turns—that the social world rewards.
If the community keeps reinforcing those actions, the text has been ‘understood.’
How this fits with other research
Hong et al. (2021) and Kostulski et al. (2021) put the idea to work. They taught kids with autism to retell or pick their own passages, and comprehension rose—showing the framework can guide real lessons.
Sorenson Duncan et al. (2021) looked at 26 studies and found word-reading skill matters as much as oral language. That sounds mentalistic, yet it fits the frame: both skills are simply more reader-text contingencies the social world can reinforce.
Green et al. (1987) said the same about spelling decades ago. Read and write enough, and standard forms emerge without drills. Pfeiffer widens the lens from letters to full meaning.
Why it matters
Stop hunting for hidden understanding. Watch what the learner does with the page and how people react. Then you can add or change contingencies—prompt a summary, ask a question, celebrate a connection—and comprehension will grow in the only place it lives: the observable interchange between reader, text, and community.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We offer an account of reading comprehension that we believe will help clarify some common conceptual confusions in the relevant literature, as well as contribute to existing functional accounts. We argue that defining texts qua texts as stimulus classes, on the one hand, and equating "comprehension" with behavior (covert or otherwise), on the other, are not useful conceptual moves, especially when behavioral settings go beyond basic literacy skills acquisition. We then analyze the structure of the contingencies that usually evoke talk of "comprehension" using techniques from analytic philosophy. We show how keeping the results of this analysis in mind can help avoid the conceptual bafflement that often arises, even among behavior analysts, when defining or assessing behavioral phenomena related to reading comprehension. Using two contrasting cases (legal texts and stories), we argue that what counts as comprehension depends, not peripherally but crucially, on the shared social practices of which texts are a part. Finally, we propose a new framework for classifying reader-text contingencies by combining two dimensions: openness of setting and embeddedness of reinforcement.
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 2020 · doi:10.1080/15021149.2001.11434165