Children’s Reading method

8/14/2019 Childrens Reading method

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Children?s ReadingComprehension Difficultie

Kate NationComprehension is the ultimate goal of reading. Everyone agreesthat reading comprehension is not a simple matter ofrecognizing individual words, or even of understanding eachindividual word as our eyes pass over it. All models ofcomprehension recognize the need for readers to build up amental representation of text, a process that requires integrationacross a range of sources of information, from lexical features

through to nowledge concerning events in the world !e.g.,"arnham, #$$%& "ernsbacher, %''$& (intsch, %'')*. "iven thecomplex nature of reading comprehension, it is not surpris- ingthat some individuals have dif+culties in this aea. ndivi dualdifferences in text comprehension have been observed in bothdevelopmental !e.g., ation /nowling,%''0. 1ahill, %''2* and college-aged populations !e.g.,"ernsbacher 3aust, %''%& 4ong, /eely, 1ppy, %'''*.5if+culty with eading comprehensio n has also been reported ina range of clinical disorders such as early onset hydrocephalus!5ennis 6arnes, %''7*, autism !/nowling 3rith, %')8*,

nonverbal learning disorder !9elletier, Ahmad, :oure, #$$%*,speci+c language impairment !ishop A dams, %''$*, ;urnerulme, "rant, (armiloff-/mith, #$$%*. ;hus, there is noshortage of evidence pointing to the fact that some individualsexperience reading comprehension dif+culties;he nature and origins of reading comprehension dif+culties, hwever, are not so clear. ;he aim of this chapter is to review whatis nown about reading comprehension dif< culties in children,with a view to addressing two ma?or issues. 3irst, althoughindividu- als who experience dif+culty with eading

comprehension can be identi+ed, does it ma sense to talabout speci+c eading comprehension dif+culties< /econd, whatare the causes of reading comprehension failure< ;he focus ofthe chapter will be on children who appear to show selective


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impairments of reading comprehension. ;hat is, their readingaccuracy is within the normal range for their age, but theircomprehension of what is read is substantially below average./tudies of such children allow us to identify cognitive systemsthat may be particularly crucial for the development of reading


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comprehension, and that are relatively independent of theprocesses underlying the development of word recognitionsills in reading.

pecifi? Deficits in eading Comprehension?Are there individuals who show speci+c eading comprehensionde +cits


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was to teach his daughters how to decode "ree and 4atin.>aving accomplished the basics of 4atin and "ree letter-soundcorrespon- dences, they were able to read the texts aloud whiletheir father listened. ;he product was, for Gilton at least,successful reading comprehension.

;hus, according to the simple view, reading comprehension is theproductof decod-

ing and linguistic comprehension. t follows from this thatchildren with poor reading comprehension must have de+citseither in decoding, linguisticcomprehension, or both. ;he logic of

this view argues that reading comprehension de+ci s cannot bespeci+c, bu


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#B$ Kate Nation

instead must be related to weanesses in one or both of itscomponent parts. 3or the children described above as havingspeci+c eading comprehensio n impairments, which componentof reading comprehension is at faultogaboam !%'0B* found that children with poor readingcomprehension were slower at reading words and non- wordsthan their classmates. Goreover, the relationship betweendecoding ef+ciency an reading comprehension is maintainedover time, and measurements of nonword reading taen in earlychildhood predict later variations in reading comprehension

measured in secondary school years and adulthood !6ruc,%''$& 9erfetti, %')B*.As pointed out by 1ahill and colleagues, however, inef+cientecoding is unliely to be the only source of readingcomprehension impairment. As noted above, some children havepoor reading comprehension but show age-appropriate levels oftext reading accuracy, leading to the conclusion thatinadequate decoding cannot be the source of poorcomprehenders


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such as the GradedNonword Reading Test !/nowling, /tothard, Gc4ean, %''8* andnonword readingef+ciency such as the Test for Word Reading Efficienc

!;orgesen, =agner, :ashotte,%'''. e.g., Garshall ation, #$$7& ation, Garshall, Altmann, #$$7*. mportantly, ation and colleagues have usedthe strategy of matching poor comprehenders to control childrenon nonword reading, thereby eliminating the possibility thatgroup differences in reading comprehension can be accounted

for by differences in decoding sill. t should be noted, however,that there are differences between poor comprehenders andtypically developing children in some aspects of word reading.=e will return to this point later. >owever, if we tae the centraltenet of the theory to be that inaccurate or slow decoding leadsto poor reading comprehension, then the children described by1ahill and by


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Children?s Reading Comprehension Difficultie #B%:eadi ng2

comprehension7#

%

onword reading $


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suggests that listening and reading comprehension depend onvery similar underlying processes. As :ayner, 3oorman,9erfetti, 9esetsy, and /eidenberg !#$$%, p. 2#* put it, It can bereasonably argued that learning to read enables a person tocomprehend written language to the same level that he or shecomprehends spoen language.


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#B# Kate Nation

As would be predicted by the strong relationship betweenwritten and spoen language comprehension, children selectedon the basis of their poor reading comprehension usually showpoor listening comprehension. ation and /nowling !%''0* asedchildren to listen to stories, and at the end of each passage oftext the children were ased a series of questions. /omequestions tapped literal understanding of what they had heard,whereas others required inferences to be made. 9oorcomprehenders performed less well than control children on thislistening comprehension tas. Consistent with these +nd ings,ation, Clare, Garshall, and 5urand !#$$2* found that poorcomprehenders also performed less well than control children!matched for age, nonverbal ability, and decoding ability* on anumber of spoen language tass, including the Comprehension

subtesttaen from the Wechsler !ntelligence "cale forChildren !=/C-u * !=echsler, %''#*. ;histest requires children to formulate a response to a variety ofhypothetical situations presented orally !e.g.,


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things to go wrong when comprehension fails.


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6efore reviewing these possible causes of readingcomprehension failure, it is worth reecting on somemethodological issues surounding the study o f poorcomprehenders. 1ne issue concerns the choice of tass used toreveal the poor comprehender pro+le 1ahill and colleaguesscreen and select poor comprehenders from regular mainstreamclassrooms based on performance on the Neale #nalysis ofReading #$ility !A:A-*!eale, %''0*. n this reading test, children read aloud shortpassages of text !generating a score for reading accuracy* andare then ased questions to assess their literal and infer- entialunderstanding of the text !generating a score for readingcomprehension*. 9oor comprehenders are selected as childrenwho show a signi+cant dscrepancy between their age-

appropriate reading accuracy and their below-average readingcomprehension. ;here are however, possible ob?ections to thisapproach, not least that in this particular reading test !theA:A*, reading accuracy and reading comprehension are notmeasured independently from one another. =ith this limitation inmind, ation and colleagues have selected poor comprehendersaccording to performance on tass that assess the twocomponents of reading !accuracy and comprehension*separately. n these studies, poor comprehenders are selectedand de+ned as those childen who ach ieve poor readingcomprehension scores on the A:A, but achieve age-appropriate

scores on a standard- ized test of owever, as a minority of children selected as poorcomprehenders show rather low cognitive ability !ation, Clare, /nowling, #$$#*, failing to control for cognitive ability couldresult in spurious conclusions.A +nal methodological note concerns the compehension-agematch design. 3ollow- ing the logic of the reading-age matchdesign !e.g., 6ryant "oswami, %')8*, /tothard and >ulme!%''#* and Cain, 1ahill, and 6ryant !#$$$a* reasoned that inorder to identify candidate causes of poor readingcomprehension, poor comprehenders should be compared withyounger, normally developing children whose comprehension

sills are at a similar level. f poor comprehenders showimpairments in a particular cognitive or linguistic sill relative toyounger control children matched for comprehension age, that


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sill is unliely to be a simple consequence of comprehensionlevel.=ith these methodological issues in mind, we return to thequestion of what causes poor reading comprehension in childrenselected as poor comprehenders. 9erfetti and colleagues!9erfetti, %')B, %''2& 9erfetti et al., %''8* have argued that poorcomprehension may be a consequence of inadequateprocessing, lac of nowledge, or some combina- tion of bothprocessing and nowledge-based weanesses. ;wo sets ofprocesses are con- sidered essential to the comprehension

process, and are described as Iinevitabl


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#B2 Kate Natione%ical processes

=hat is meant by lexical processes in this context< =hile someauthors use the term to refer to the ef+ciency of sublexicalpocessing, that is, the a bility to mae mappings betweenorthography and phonology, it is also used more broadly tocapture, amongst other sills, phonological processing andlexical access !e.g., 9erfetti, %''2*. :esearch on poorcomprehenders has revealed a systematic pro+le of stength sand weanesses across different aspects of lexical processing. tis thus important to consider different aspects of lexicalprocessing separately.&honological s'ills( t is well established that childrenowever, as noted by Cain, 1ahill, and 6ryant !#$$$b*,the relationship between phonology and reading comprehensionmay not be direct. nstead, the relationship between phonologi-cal sills and reading comprehension may be mediated by wordrecognition. n line with this view, a number of studies havedemonstrated that phonological sills are not impaired inchildren with speci+c compehension dif+cultiesF acoss a ra nge ofdifferent phonological processing tass, including phonemedeletion, rhyme oddity, ?udgment and uenc, spoonerisms, and

nonword repetition, poor comprehenders are indistinguishablefrom control children !e.g., Cain, et al., #$$$b& ation et al.,#$$2& ation /nowling, %'')a& /tothard >ulme, %''B*. Heryclearly, a bottlenec in phonological processing cannot accountfor poor comprehenders


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semantic priming !ation /nolwing, %'''* and relativeweanesses in picture naming !ation, Garshall, /nowling, #$$%* have also been observed. t is important tonote, however, that the de+cits obseved in these experimentswere not ?ust symptoms of generally poor language& forinstance, de+cits in semantic ?udgment and semantic uencwere accompanied by normal levels of performance on paralleltass tapping rhyme ?udgment and rhyme uenc. =hat seems tounite those aspects of lexical processing that poorcomprehenders +n dif+cult is meaning.;o ?udge whether two

words mean the same, or to produce exem- plars to a categorylabel, clearly depends on an appreciation of word meaning!whereas,


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Children?s Reading Comprehension Difficultie #BB

in contrast, commonly used measures of childrenulme, %''#*. ;hus, in line with 9erfettiulme !%''#*demonstrating group de+cits on a est of syntactic com-prehension, the Test for the Reception of Grammar !;:1"* !6ishop, %')7*.nterestingly,not all studies +nd;:1"-de+cits in childen with poor text-lev elreading comprehension !e.g., uill 1ahill, %''%*& however,inconsistent +ndi gs across studies are dif< cult to interpret as,

typically, performance levels on the ;:1" have been close toceiling. A new edition of the ;:1" !;:1"-#& 6ishop, #$$7*contains more items, and is stan- dardized through to adulthood.A recent study using this more sensitive test !Cragg ation, inpress* provides clear evidence pointing to syntacticcomprehension impairments in poor comprehenders !standardscores were )$ and '2 for the poor comprehenders and controlchildren respectively*.n summary, there is considerable evidence supporting the viewthat poor comprehenders have oral language weanesses.ation et al. !#$$2* concluded that low-language characterized

poor comprehenders as a group, and furthermore, a substantialminority of the sample met criteria for speci+c languageimpairment !/4& ee 6ishop, %''0, for a review*. mportantly,however, and unlie the ma?ority of children with /4, poor com-prehenders showed no dif+culty with phonological pocessing. nstead, their oral language sills were characterized by relativeweanesses in dealing with the nonphonological aspects oflanguage, ranging from lexical-level weanesses !vocabulary*through to dif< culties with interpreting nonliteral language.

)isual word recognition( /o far discussion has focused on aspects of

lexical processing cap-tured by children


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orthography and phonology is a lexical processing sill that isvital to the reading comprehension process. 1n this view, theability to decode and identify words accurately and ef+cientlyallws resources t o be devoted to comprehension processes. Asdiscussed earlier, decoding ef+ciency is clearly related to readingcomprehension in general terms. 6ut is there any evidence tosuggest that poor comprehenders


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#B8 Kate Nation

comprehenders show normal phonological processing sills,suggesting that their decoding is not underpinned by low-quality phonological nowledge.

nterestingly, however, even when poor comprehenders areclosely matched to control children for decoding ability, subtlegroup differences in visual word recognition have beenobserved. ation and /nowling !%'')a* found that poorcomprehenders were less accurate and ef+cient than contolchildren at reading irregula r words and low-frequency words&there were no group differences when reading regular words andhigh-frequency words. 5rawing on 9laut, GcClelland, /eidenberg,and 9atterson


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nonwords at age-appropriate levels as measured by standardizedtests, and their phonological sills were well developed. t seemsunliely that such children are devoting excessive resources toword identi+cation and decoding, or that their eading comprehension is severely com- promised by inef+cient wod-identi+cation pocesses.n summary, a number of conclusions concerning the status oflexical processing in children selected as having


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Children?s Reading Comprehension Difficultie #B0

ciency hypothesis, it is clear that these sills are notcompromised in children selected as having a speci+c eadingcomprehension problem. >owever, other aspects of lexical pro-cessing are wea in poor comprehenders. 5e+cits in semantic pocessing are apparent, and these may be related to more generalweanesses with linguistic comprehension.Wor'ing memory

4anguage comprehension places heavy demands on woringmemory resources. =hether reading or listening,representations of words and sentences must be held in memorywhile other aspects of the text or discourse are processed and

bacground nowledge is activated and integrated !see e.g.(intsch :awson, this volume*. /upport for the rela- tionshipbetween comprehension and woring memory comes from anumber of sources, including observations that college studentsselected on the basis of low woring memory span achieve lowercomprehension scores than their Ihigh spa< peers, and performless well on various components of comprehension such aspronoun resolution !5aneman Carpenter, %')$, %')7*. Gostrelevant for this chapter are investigations of woring memory inpoor comprehenders. ;hree studies have addressed this issuedirectly. uill, 1ahill, and 9arin !%')'* ased children to read

aloud triplets of numbers and then to recall the +nal digit in eachtriple. oor comprehenders perfor med less well than controlchildren, leading uill et al. !%')'* to suggest that de+cits nnonlinguistic woring memory may underlie the readingcomprehension problems seen in this group of children.>owever, as the counting span tas required children to readand recall digits, the data are more suggestive of a verbalmemory de+cit than a nonlnguistic one. 1n a test ofnonlinguistic spatial memory span, ation, Adams, 6owyer-Crane, and /nowling !%'''* found no differences between poorcomprehenders and a control group.

;o investigate verbal woring memory in poor comprehendersfurther, /tothard and >ulme !%''#* adapted 5aneman andCarpenter


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/tothard and >ulme


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#B) Kate Nation

may underpin their poor text comprehension. >owever, issues ofcausality are far from clear. t is generally accepted that in acomplex memory span tas such as listening span, individualsowever, the question then arises as towhy poor comprehenders have wea vocabulary nowledge. 4acof vocabulary nowledge is associated with weanesses in verbalJ, and, consistent with this, poor comprehenders achieve lowerverbal J scores than control children !ation, et al., #$$#*.>owever, as a substantial component of verbal J is vocabularynowledge, this observation does not help us understand thenature of poor comprehendersulme,%''#*. /imilarly, poor comprehenders show normal effects of

word length and phonological similarity in short-term memory!ation et al., %'''& 1ahill, uill, 9arin, %')8*. ;aentogether, these +nd ings demonstrate that poor comprehenders


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do not have de+cits i short-term verbal memory capacity.mportantly however, the extent to which poor comprehendersshow normal short-term recall depends critically on the nature ofthe items to be recalled. ation et al. !%''', Experiment #*compared short-term serial recall for lists of concretewords !e.g., tooth,plate, fruit* and abstract words !e.g.,

luc',pride, wise*. Although poorcomprehenders and controls did not differ in memory span forconcrete words, poor comprehenders recalled fewer abstractwords. t is established that the availability of semantic

information inuences shot-term recall, and that concrete wordsmay receive more ulme, %'''*. =ithin thistheoretical framewor, ation et al. !%'''* suggested that aspoor


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comprehenders have semantic weanesses, they bene+t lessfom s emantic support, espe- cially when the semanticcontribution to recall is stressed by asing them to recallabstract rather than concrete words, and under thesecircumstances short-term recall


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9oor comprehenders do, however, have weanesses in otheraspects of language sill with de+cits at bothlower !e.g.,vocabulary nowledge* and higher levels !e.g., inferencegeneration, understanding +guratie language* being reported!ation et al., #$$2*. Although it is possible to describe differenttass according to whether they tap low-level or high-levelprocesses, it is argued here that the distinction between differentlevels of processing may not be useful, at least until longer- termlongitudinal data become available.


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Children?s Reading Comprehension Difficultie #8B

1ne of the dif+culties facing the esearcher interested in understanding the nature of poor comprehenders


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Children’s Reading method

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