Beyond Decoding: Cognition of Academic Reading

Explore the cognitive models behind academic reading. Understand how cognitive load and pre-coding shape comprehension.

Understanding the cognitive load and processes behind academic reading beyond the simple view.

The intention behind the Academic Reading Framework is to shift the focus on ‘decoding’ stressed in the well-known ‘simple view of reading’ which equates reading comprehension with decoding and language comprehension. The language comprehension that is mostly sufficient in the reading of stories, lists, or simple non-narrative texts, simply cannot be taken for granted in academic reading where understanding of individual words or sentences often depends on understanding deeper context.

It is important to remember that the ‘simple view of reading’ was designed to explain the needs of readers in the early stages of developing their reading skills. These readers often struggle with reading individual words or short sentences that they would otherwise understand perfectly well. This is not sufficient for helping us come to grips with needs of readers at the level of entire texts, let alone academic literature.

That does not mean that decoding may still not present a significant block to an academic reader but simply solving decoding is not enough particularly when it is done at the expense of allowing the reader to build larger cognitive maps of their reading.

For example, listening to texts is a valuable technique for all readers to enhance their understanding, help with focus, and reduce tiredness. It is often the only decoding option for readers with dyslexia and visual impairments. But these readers than need to develop strategies for approaching complex texts and collection of texts that a listening-only approach makes more difficult.

This section will try to outline an approach for thinking about cognition at the two levels: decoding of words and sentences and decoding of larger more schematic meanings required when developing an understanding of academic readings.

Cognitive load model

The academic reading frameworks looks at reading as complex activity that cannot be simply described through the perspective of cognition. However, cognition is still of central concern and many of the barriers readers encounter, they experience as primarily cognitive or they show up through cognition.

That’s why the concept of cognitive load is a useful lens to use to interpret the readers experience even though the activity itself seemingly does not have a straightforward purely cognitive explanation.

Beyond the ‘simple view of reading’

The cognition involved in reading is complex but for the purposes of early reading instruction, it can be simplified into a simple formula ‘reading comprehension = decoding + language comprehension’. This means that once we can decode the letters that make up a word, as long as we can understand the word or the sequence of words, we understand what we are reading.

Even at the introductory level, we know that much more is going on but adding that complexity turns out to be unnecessarily complicated for beginner readers of simple texts such as stories. But with academic reading we need to bring all that complexity back in. Comprehending an academic text is simply not just the result of decoding letters into words and converting words into meaning.

Articulation of Reading

Reading is a complex process that happens across multiple levels. We need to pay attention to all of them to capture what we need. Any one of these levels can serve as a source of increase of cognitive load or even become a barrier to success.

From decoding to encoding

Even the notion of comprehension needs to be expanded from the simple view of being able to retrieve meanings of words contained in text. Readers are in a very real sense creating meanings in their minds during the process of reading. Therefore, the process of decoding is coupled with encoding. As readers decode additional words and segments, they are actively building a semantic picture (for lack of a better word). Each additional segment being read has the potential of completely rewriting that picture.

This is simply part of any language comprehension (spoken and written) but in most language comprehension situations, the cognitive load is so insignificant, we can simply think of it as a black box. However, academic reading places much more demand on the cognition of the reader and requires much more effort placed into the encoding that we can no longer think of it as ‘simple comprehension’.

Pre-coding and re-coding

Also, similarly with second language learning, we need to pay much closer attention to the activation of knowledge and focus that happens prior to reading. In order to deal with the complexity of the text, the academic reader needs to develop a map of content that make the cognition required for decoding:encoding manageable. This is particularly essential for beginner academic readers who are additionally struggling with the conventions of academic writing and the ways of communication conventional in their new field.

This step can be called pre-coding and it may happen in various ways – both immediately before (and even during reading) or as part of the process of engagement with the reading and its context (as we saw, academic reading happens at the level of literatures and not individual texts).

To capture the full scope of academic reading and comprehension, we also need to think beyond the moment of ‘reading’ (decoding:precoding). The complete understanding develops through active engagement often expressed through comparison, notes, writing or graphical organisation that takes the encoded information and re-codes in a way that allows the reader to integrate the disparate sources.

Manipulation as a contributor to cognitive load

This whole process happens both at the moment of reading as well as over time. It also happens in space with a physical dimension. The reader has to engage with the text to take notes, create highlights, organise excerpts and notes, place it in a position where it can be compared. Doing this more or less effectively can increase or decrease the cognitive load required for decoding:encoding and prevent effective recoding (which is the true purpose of academic reading). We therefore must pay close attention to the whole process. (We includes readers, educators, publishers, tool creators.)

Graphical summary

The whole picture can be summarized with a simple graph.

However, this simple representation assumes too much linearity. On closer inspection, a much more complex picture of mutual feedback emerges. We have created an interactive tool to explore these connections.

Open Cognition Explorer