"What Kind of Person..." - Analyzing SLIFE Reading Comprehension Test Results

Recently, I was analyzing the results of student literacy assessments with a colleague.  We noted that reading comprehension questions which asked the reader to classify a character as a certain "kind" of person were particularly difficult for the adolescent SLIFE we had tested. Questions that began with, "What kind of person is...," were typically met with silence or with the response "good" or "bad."

I was immediately reminded of a section (pg. 53-54) from Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word by Walter Ong. In it, Ong refers to a series of interviews that A.R. Luria conducted among illiterate and semi-literate persons in remote areas of Uzbekistan in the 1930's.  Ong notes that:

Luria’s illiterates had difficulty in articulate self-analysis... Luria put his questions only after protracted conversation about people’s characteristics and their individual differences (1976, p. 148). A 38-year-old man, illiterate, from a mountain pasture camp was asked (1976, p. 150), ‘What sort of person are you, what’s your character like, what are your good qualities and shortcomings? How would you describe yourself?’ ‘I came here from Uch-Kurgan, I was very poor, and now I’m married and have children.’ ‘Are you satisfied with yourself or would you like to be different?’ ‘It would be good if I had a little more land and could sow some wheat.’ Externals command attention. ‘And what are your shortcomings?’ ‘This year I sowed one pood of wheat, and we’re gradually fixing the shortcomings.’ More external situations. ‘Well, people are different - calm, hot-tempered, or sometimes their memory is poor. What do you think of yourself?’ ‘We behave well - if we were bad people, no one would respect us’ (1976, p. 15). Self-evaluation modulated into group evaluation (‘we’) and then handled in terms of expected reactions from others. Another man, a peasant aged 36, asked what sort of person he was, responded with touching and humane directness: ‘What can I say about my own heart? How can I talk about my character? Ask others; they can tell you about me. I myself can’t say anything.’

 I couldn't see my students giving those exact answers, but the pragmatic style of the responses and the emphasis on concrete details rather than abstract categories sounded very familiar!  Ong's explanation of this tendency stands out for me as still being particularly relevant:

These are a few samples from Luria’s many, but they are typical. One could argue that responses were not optimal because the respondents were not used to being asked these kinds of questions, no matter how cleverly Luria could work them into riddle-like settings. But lack of familiarity is precisely the point: an oral culture simply does not deal in such items as geometrical figures, abstract categorization, formally logical reasoning processes, definitions, or even comprehensive descriptions, or articulated self-analysis, all of which derive not simply from thought itself but from text-formed thought. Luria’s questions are schoolroom questions associated with the use of texts, and indeed closely resemble or are identical with standard intelligence test questions got up by literates. They are legitimate, but they come from a world the oral respondent does not share.

This passage reminded me of the power of literacy and the ability of text-based education to profoundly affect how we think about ourselves and others.  It also reminded me of the need to interpret reading comprehension questions with caution.  Our SLIFE who had difficulty answering the "What kind of person..." questions could often recall specific details and events from the story.  It wasn't necessarily that the text was too advanced for them to understand and that we needed to give them easier stories.  It was just that they were thinking about the story differently and focusing on different aspects of it.  This does not mean that we should avoid teaching them the skills for character analysis or the abstract vocabulary for describing kinds of characters.  Instead, I would suggest that we continue to do so, but that we teach those things with texts at their appropriate decoding levels and with content which they find engaging.  We should not to restrict them to texts designed for less mature learners while we build those character analysis skills and vocabulary banks.


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Luria, A. R. (1976) Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, ed. Michael Cole, trans. by Lopez-Morillas, M. & Solotaroff, L. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press

Ong, W. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London, England: Methuen