Professor Snow comments:

Kevin has read the text without stumbling over relatively long or difficult words like caterpillar or broccoli. He demonstrates here a reasonable level of immediate memory for facts he encountered in the text, though without relating them to the larger schema within which they were presented (what a cabbage caterpillar looks like, what it eats, where to find it.) Understanding that schema requires having the reader's attention drawn to the headings on the page, or having a rich conceptual structure that dictates the sort of thing that the reader might want to know about a newly encountered caterpillar species. 

 

Interviewer:		Do you remember why the caterpillar is called the cabbage caterpillar?
Kevin:		What?
Interviewer:		Why is the caterpillar called cabbage caterpillar?
Kevin:		Because he is skinny.

Again, Kevin demonstrates his capacity to remember facts he encountered in the text—but without integrating that information effectively with his background knowledge or the newly posed questions. The text states, "The cabbage caterpillar was named for its favorite food." Perhaps Kevin doesn't know the word cabbage and thus cannot relate it to favorite food. Or perhaps the phrasing is simply too elliptical to have been clear, especially since the following sentence mentions broccoli and cauliflower explicitly as favorite foods, without noting that they are members of the cabbage family. Is it fair not to make that link? The text is also somewhat unfriendly in that it includes in the paragraph about favorite foods a totally irrelevant fact about the caterpillar being covered with fuzz—probably because a fuzzy caterpillar is pictured next to that paragraph.

 

Interviewer:		Okay, and what does a cabbage caterpillar eat?
Kevin:		What he eats?
Interviewer:		Uh huh.
Kevin:		Broccoli.

Here's another demonstration that Kevin did learn some facts from reading this text.

 

Interviewer:		Broccoli, okay, and where can you find a cabbage caterpillar?
Kevin:		(pause) I don't remember.

But learning all the new facts from even a brief text is difficult without a larger conceptual structure in which to place them. Informational texts like this one often presuppose the larger conceptual structure, and thus quickly become boring or overwhelming for readers who lack it. Narrative texts, like Ramona Quimby, Age 8, also presuppose a great deal—an understanding of the narrative genre, which most primary students have achieved, but also an understanding of social relations and how language is used to negotiate them, and a sensitivity to the nonliteral uses of language, which may require explicit instruction.    next