In order to answer this question, my team undertook an exercise called ‘Deconstructing Passages’. This is a process in which we broke down texts into their smallest components, ran student pilots, and tried to map patterns of accuracy and confusion, after which we edit passages to ensure rigour and accessibility. As a team, we set out to discover what a good reading comprehension passage is by trying to understand what is not a good reading comprehension passage. We’ll look at what worked and what didn’t, exploring an example where readability indices and simplification do not expose the full nature of the passage’s difficulty.

As we set about considering the reasons for this poor performance, we began to think about hypotheses for the potential reasons behind this poor performance. These hypotheses then guided how we edited these passages. Our most common edits centred around adding meanings to difficult words, simplifying complex sentences, and providing clearer context for unfamiliar terms. In some cases, we did see an increase in accuracy levels after implementing these changes, suggesting that the passage was otherwise sound. In other cases, however, we noted no change or a marginal decrease in accuracy levels after implementing these changes, which prompted us to go back to the drawing board with a new problem: what were we missing in this process of reverse engineering?

The answer, of course, was quite obvious! In the frenzy of de-constructing passages, we’d forgotten to account for the effects of an ingredient we’d never missed when constructing a passage: cultural context. Readability scores, while being deeply important in assessing the suitability of a passage for a given grade, are calculated after the passage has already been created. Additionally, since they are numerical in nature, they cannot entirely account for the experience of reading a passage, which cannot be translated into numbers. This realisation prompted us to think about the challenges which may not be evident at first, but which deeply affect the experience of reading a story. In this context, we can look at a passage as a machine, made up of complex, interconnected moving parts. Each of these parts has to work together to create the story. The most important, however, are the ‘invisible’ components, like oil and lubricants, that keep the machine running smoothly.

Let’s examine this idea with a story, ( Hey Mr.White That’s the Wrong Colour for that), which my team tagged to Grade 6, called ‘Hey, Mr White, That’s the Wrong Colour for That’, a story about the author, Robb Smith, and his experience living with colour blindness. He reveals his color blindness gradually; he starts with a short anecdote, then goes on to describe various personal experiences before thinking about the larger picture of perceptions and misunderstandings. This passage perplexed us because students repeatedly got the meaning of the term ‘colour blindness’ wrong, despite the meaning being explicitly stated in the third paragraph of the passage. What was interfering with their comprehension of the passage?

One of the first challenges with this passage is the time at which information is presented. The definition of colour blindness, which is central to understanding the story, is given to us only midway through the passage. This means that students must mentally hold onto different, seemingly unrelated pieces of information, and make sense of them once the definition appears. This process is challenging for second-language learners, especially if their working memory is already occupied with interpreting unfamiliar words. What makes this harder is that colour blindness is not commonly discussed in the Indian context. Another such cultural disconnection occurs at the section in the story when a student asks Mr. White, “How can you tell if a woman gets shy and blushes?” This line only makes sense if the reader understands both what blushing looks like and that colour blindness would make noticing a blush impossible. But is ‘blushing’ part of a typical Grade 6 Indian student’s vocabulary? Do they know what it looks like, or what its social meaning is?

Research by Steffensen, Joag-dev, and Anderson (1979), Johnson (1981), and Carrell (1981a) shows that the cultural background of the text interacts with the reader’s own cultural background, helping them form a mental picture of the text. Additionally, in cases where the cultural context of a text was unfamiliar, students found it much harder to read and understand than a text that was grammatically equivalent, but from a familiar context. The Mr White passage, then, is challenging on all fronts: vocabulary, sentence structure, and cultural context. Therefore, it puts a heavy load on students, since they have to understand word meanings at both the word and sentence level. This leaves them with no resources to connect the paragraphs to each other. This story, therefore, teaches us that we need to consider both the grade-appropriateness of a passage’s vocabulary, and more importantly, the appropriateness of the action it asks the student to take.