Diversity is the one true thing we have in common. Celebrate it every day.

I often listen to books on tape with my children while I do errands and drive them to their activities. When my daughter was four years old and we were listening to a story, she said, “Mom, when I listen to the stories, I see pictures in my head. Do you see the same pictures?” This was a thought-provoking question for a number of reasons. First, she was describing what good readers do — visualize the story as they read while the details add up to a mental picture. Second, I was reminded that we all create mental pictures while reading, and that our pictures may vary greatly. For example, when my children and I read the Harry Potter books, we discussed our different ideas about what Harry, Hermione, and Ron looked like. (Now that I've seen the movie, I can't seem to remember what I thought they looked like!) Perhaps what is most interesting about the visualization that takes place as we read, is that the pictures in our minds reflect our own experiences. We connect what we read to our context, and we comprehend new ideas more deeply if we can relate to them.

In a 1979 study on cross-cultural comprehension, subjects from the U.S. and India read letters about an American and an Indian wedding and recalled them following interpolated tasks. When subjects read the passage about the wedding from their own culture (“the native passage”), researchers observed the following behaviors: subjects read the passage more rapidly, recalled a larger amount of information, and produced more culturally appropriate elaborations of the content. When the subjects read the “foreign passage” about the other culture's wedding, they read the passage more slowly, recalled much less information, and produced more culturally-based distortions. The results indicated that cultural context influences comprehension, and that this phenomenon occurs regardless of an individual's background. (Steffensen, Joag-Deve, & Anderson, 1979).

(Available: https://www.readingrockets.org. Access on: 12/02/2020. Adapted.)