Some children understand every word in a sentence and still lose the reference point.
“Put this over there.”
“We’ll do it then.”
“That was the problem.”
“Come here now.”
The words are ordinary. Their meanings are not fixed. They depend on who is speaking, where the speaker is, what has just been mentioned and which moment is being treated as the centre of the conversation.
This is the Deictic Anchoring Gap: the learner can decode words such as this, that, here, there, now and then but does not reliably rebuild the speaker-centred reference system that tells us what those words point to.
Some English words move with the speaker
Words such as tree, pencil and gravity have relatively stable lexical meanings.
Deictic words behave differently. Their interpretation shifts with context.
- I means the current speaker.
- you means the current addressee.
- here means a location anchored to the speaker or current discourse.
- now means a time anchored to the current moment.
- this and that point to entities, ideas or stretches of discourse relative to the speaker’s focus.
Reading and listening therefore require constant re-anchoring.
SETC’s Context Read owns the explicit reading layer. This article owns the parent-facing diagnosis: why a child may understand the sentence locally but still misidentify the person, place, time or idea that the sentence is pointing to.
Failure pattern 1: this and that lose their referents
A passage says:
The council rejected the proposal after residents raised concerns about traffic. This surprised the developers.
What does this refer to?
The rejection? The residents’ concerns? The traffic issue?
Strong readers use discourse structure to recover the intended referent. Weak readers may attach the word to the nearest noun instead.
Failure pattern 2: here and there are treated as fixed locations
“We lived there for five years before moving here.”
Without a clear speaker position, there and here are incomplete.
A learner may understand both words separately yet fail to build the spatial shift they encode.
Failure pattern 3: reported speech keeps the old anchor
Direct speech:
“I will finish this tomorrow,” Lina said on Monday.
Reported later:
Lina said she would finish it the next day.
The temporal anchor has moved.
Children who keep tomorrow attached to the reader’s present instead of the speaker’s original present can reconstruct the wrong timeline.
This connects to SETC’s Temporal Language Gap.
Failure pattern 4: pronouns shift when speakers change
In dialogue, I changes owner every time the speaker changes.
A child may track the conversation’s topic but lose the speaker-indexed pronouns, especially when quotation marks, reporting clauses or dialogue turns are dense.
Failure pattern 5: now and then are treated as simple vocabulary
“Back then, we thought the plan would work. Now we know why it failed.”
The meaning depends on two temporal centres.
A learner who treats then and now as loose time words may miss the contrast in knowledge across time.
Failure pattern 6: discourse deixis is mistaken for object reference
“The company promised lower prices but increased fees instead. That is why customers complained.”
That refers to the preceding situation, not one concrete object.
Advanced reading increasingly uses this and that to package whole propositions, arguments or events.
Failure pattern 7: instructions become ambiguous outside the original setting
“Put it here.” works when speaker, listener and object are physically co-present.
In written instructions, the same phrasing may be too vague.
Children who transfer conversational deixis into formal writing can produce text that makes sense only to someone who already shares the writer’s physical or mental context.
Failure pattern 8: this paragraph and the previous paragraph blur
Academic texts use phrases such as in this section, at this point, the former, the latter, above and below.
These are navigation anchors.
If the child does not resolve them precisely, references detach from the ideas they organise.
Failure pattern 9: perspective shifts break the anchor
A story moves from one character’s viewpoint to another.
Here, there, now and this may need to be rebuilt around a different consciousness.
This overlaps with SETC’s Perspective-Tracking Gap.
Failure pattern 10: writing assumes a shared context that does not exist
The child writes:
This shows that it was wrong.
What is this? What is it? Wrong in what way?
To the writer, the referents are obvious. To the reader, the sentence is under-anchored.
A parent diagnostic: move the speaker
Use a simple scenario involving two rooms, two people and two times.
Ask the child how the same situation would be described from each person’s position:
- here / there;
- this / that;
- now / then;
- I / you;
- today / tomorrow / yesterday.
If the words remain fixed even when the speaker changes, deictic anchoring is unstable.
Repair principle 1: identify the deictic centre
Before interpreting a deictic word, ask:
- Who is speaking?
- Where are they?
- When are they speaking?
- What idea is currently in focus?
Repair principle 2: replace moving words with explicit referents
Temporarily replace this, that, here or then with the actual noun, place or time.
If the sentence becomes clearer, the problem was anchoring rather than vocabulary.
Repair principle 3: transform direct and reported speech
Move sentences between direct and reported speech while updating pronouns, time words and place words.
This trains the learner to shift the centre deliberately.
Repair principle 4: audit vague references in writing
Circle every this, that, it and they.
Ask whether a reader can identify the referent without reading the writer’s mind.
The anchoring ladder
- Identify speaker and addressee.
- Anchor place and time.
- Resolve this/that to objects or ideas.
- Track shifts in speaker or viewpoint.
- Update deictic words in reported speech.
- Resolve discourse-level references.
- Use explicit anchors in independent writing.
What not to confuse with the Deictic Anchoring Gap
- If ordinary pronouns are consistently confused, cohesion or working memory may be upstream.
- If the child cannot follow viewpoint changes, perspective tracking may be the larger issue.
- If time words are understood but chronology is wrong, temporal language may be primary.
What improvement should look like
- This and that attach to clearer referents.
- Direct and reported speech preserve person, place and time correctly.
- Perspective shifts cause fewer reference errors.
- Writing contains fewer vague pointing words.
- The child can explain how the same word changes meaning when the speaker moves.
The deeper lesson
Some words do not carry their full meaning inside themselves.
They point.
The useful question is:
Can my child identify the person, place, time or idea from which this sentence is being viewed?
When the answer becomes yes, the invisible coordinate system behind everyday English becomes much easier to control.
Research spine
- What Works Clearinghouse — Improving Adolescent Literacy
- Education Endowment Foundation — Oral Language Interventions
- Reading Rockets — Effective Comprehension Instruction
Continue through The parent guide collection: why English feels difficult to choose the next connected guide.