THE ESSENTIALS

• The latest international PISA survey revealed a decline in reading levels, particularly with long texts.
• In addition to attentional skills, so-called “deep” reading depends on the resonance that the text evokes in each individual.
• What conditions must be maintained so that reading remains a means of self-development and shaping one’s experience?

Fifteen-year-olds are reportedly less able to understand the texts they read than they were a few years ago. And the decline in their performance is particularly pronounced when the texts are long. This is one of the findings of the latest edition of the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) survey, conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Among the causes regularly cited to explain this negative trend is the way certain digital devices capture our attention, their mechanisms supposedly designed to maximize our engagement. This phenomenon is said to be compounded by a longer-standing trend of accelerating societal change described by the German sociologist and philosopher Hartmut Rosa.

Our relationship to time and information would thus have become less and less compatible with prolonged reading: our ability to engage in what Maryanne Wolf, professor emerita of education at UCLA, calls “deep reading” would have gradually eroded, perhaps causing us to slide towards this “goldfish civilization” described by press executive Bruno Patino.

But talking about “deep reading” can be misleading. It’s not a single cognitive ability that we possess to varying degrees. Reading a text at length, seeking to understand it, actually mobilizes a set of processes that must work together.

Reading to build meaning

For Maryanne Wolf, deep reading refers precisely to this set of processes which allow us to go beyond decoding and literal understanding of a text: mobilizing prior knowledge, producing inferences (that is, activating information that is not explicitly expressed) and analogies, possibly adopting the point of view of others, but also critically analyzing and evaluating what we have just read.

Beyond the cognitive dimension, this reading can also be considered from the perspective of the reader’s experience. The work of anthropologist Michèle Petit shows how reading can be a way of shaping one’s experience, constructing meaning, and constructing oneself.

Maryanne Wolf experienced this herself. In Reader, Stay with Us!, she recounts how difficult it became for her to find the time and energy to read in its entirety a demanding novel she had once loved. Engrossed in her work and in an environment that encouraged faster, more fragmented reading, she observed that her own reading habits had changed.

His testimony raises an essential question: what do we need to maintain our ability to engage in deep reading and, above all, to stay in it?

Cognitive resources

Several studies on attention difficulties provide some answers. In 2013, Amanda Miller and her colleagues showed that children aged 9 to 10 years with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) remembered fewer central ideas from a 263-word text than children of the same age without ADHD.

According to the authors, maintaining their attention during reading could mobilize more resources in these children, which would then no longer be available to link the central ideas together and build a coherent representation of the text.

That same year, Pnina Stern and Lilach Shalev also demonstrated, in adolescents with and without ADHD, an association between their performance on a sustained attention task and their reading comprehension. This research underscores how sustained attention is a prerequisite for deep reading. Reading a long text requires maintaining attention long enough to progressively connect information and construct a coherent representation of what one is reading.

A question of interest in the text

But our ability to remain attentive to a text depends not only on the cognitive resources at our disposal. It also depends on the interest we show in it. This is illustrated by a study by Sabine Krawietz and her colleagues published in 2012.

Young and older adults were asked to read the first five chapters of Tolstoy’s War and Peace , while researchers assessed how often their minds wandered from the text. Contrary to expectations, the older participants, despite having less efficient working memory, exhibited less mind wandering than the younger ones. But they also found the text more engaging.

When researchers statistically controlled for this interest, the difference in reading lapses between the two age groups disappeared. Interest in the text thus appears to help explain why older readers were better able to maintain their attention.

Interest thus appears as one of the factors likely to promote sustained attention during reading. But it probably doesn’t fully explain what leads us to engage in it. As the work of Michèle Petit suggests, reading can also acquire meaning through what it allows readers to draw from their own experience.

More broadly, the significance of a text depends on the situation in which we encounter it: we may read to understand a question that concerns us, acquire knowledge we need, prepare for a task, or enter into a world that is important to us.

To avoid competing demands

However, the reading conditions must allow for this level of engagement. The medium itself can contribute to this. Studies comparing reading on paper and on screen highlight, in particular, an advantage of paper for understanding informational texts . Its physicality also provides spatial and sensorimotor cues that can help readers locate and organize information as they read . Paper thus seems to offer particularly favorable conditions for attentive and in-depth reading, without making such reading impossible on a screen.

Having sufficient time and being able to momentarily escape competing demands are other conditions that can encourage prolonged reading. The challenge, therefore, is not simply to encourage longer reading sessions, but to preserve situations in which sustained attention can actually be engaged and in which we have sufficient reasons to engage it.

Maintaining our ability to read long texts thus requires considering both the reader’s attentional resources, their reasons for using them, and the conditions that make this use possible. To avoid entering or remaining in a “goldfish civilization,” it is less a matter of forcing ourselves to remain attentive than of continuing to create situations in which reading at length deserves our attention.

Author Bio: Frédéric Bernard is a Senior Lecturer in Neuropsychology at the University of Strasbourg