Reading comprehension: nature, assessment and teaching.

The goal of reading is understanding. In order to understand print, a child must be able to decode the words on the page and to extract meaning. A large body of research focuses on how children learn to decode text and how best to foster children’s decoding skills. In contrast, we know much less about the process of reading comprehension in children. In this booklet we first consider what is required in order to ‘read for meaning’. We then move on to discuss children who have difficulties with reading comprehension. Our aim is to enable teachers to assess individual differences in reading and to foster the comprehension strategies that characterize fluent reading

Children’s inference generation:the role of vocabulary and working memory

Inferences are crucial to successful discourse comprehension. We assessed the contributions of vocabulary and working memory to inference making in children aged 5 to 6 (n=44), 7 to 8 (n=43) and 9 to 10 (n=43) years. Children listened to short narratives and answered questions to assess local and global coherence inferences after each one. ANOVA confirmed developmental improvements on both types of inference. Although standardized measures of both vocabulary and working memory were correlated with inference making, multiple regression analyses determined that vocabulary was the key predictor. For local coherence inferences, only vocabulary predicted unique variance for the 6- and 8- year-olds; in contrast, none of the variables predicted performance for the 10-year-olds. For global coherence inferences, vocabulary was the only unique predictor for each age group. Mediation analysis confirmed that, although working memory was associated with the ability to generate local and global coherence inferences in 6- to 10-year-olds, the effect was mediated by vocabulary. We conclude that vocabulary knowledge supports inference making in two ways: through knowledge of word meanings required to generate inferences and also through its contribution to memory processes

The relations between lower and higher level comprehension skills and their role in prediction of early reading comprehension

This study of 4- to 6-year-olds had two aims. First to determine how lower-level comprehension skills (receptive vocabulary and grammar) and verbal memory support early higher-level comprehension skills (inference and literal story comprehension). Second to establish the predictive power of these skills on subsequent reading comprehension. Eighty-two children completed assessments of nonverbal ability, receptive vocabulary and grammar, verbal short-term memory, and inferential and literal comprehension of a picture book narrative. Vocabulary was a unique predictor of concurrent narrative comprehension. Longitudinally, inference skills, literal comprehension and grammar made independent contributions to reading comprehension one year later. The influence of vocabulary on reading comprehension was mediated through both inference and literal comprehension. The results show that inference skills are critical to the construction of text representations in the earliest stages of reading comprehension development

Young children’s comprehension of temporal relations in complex sentences:the influence of memory on performance

The present study investigated 3- to 7-year-olds’ (N = 91) comprehension of two-clause sentences containing the temporal connectives before or after. The youngest children used an order of mention strategy to interpret the relation between clauses: They were more accurate when the presentation order matched the chronological order of events: “He ate his lunch, before he played in the garden” (chronological) versus “Before he played in the garden, he ate his lunch” (reverse). Between 4 and 6 years, performance was influenced by a combination of factors that influenced processing load: connective type and presentation order. An independent measure of working memory was predictive of performance. The study concludes that the memory demands of some sentence structures limits young children’s comprehension of sentences containing temporal connectives

Text comprehension and its relation to coherence and cohesion in children’s fictional narratives.

This study investigated the relation between children’s text comprehension, their ability to produce a coherent and cohesive story, and the extent to which external cues aid these aspects of narrative production. Children with reading comprehension difficulties demonstrated deficits in both aspects of story organization, relative to sameage skilled comprehenders and younger children of equivalent comprehension ability. Their performance was poor when a topic title was used to elicit the narrative, but performance improved when stories were elicited with more informative verbal and pictorial prompts. Stories with poorer structures did not contain proportionately fewer connectives in general, but the type of connective included differed in relation to story event structure. These findings are discussed in relation to the use of coherence and cohesion in narratives and their relation to comprehension skill

Understanding the semantic functions of but in middle childhood:the role of text- and sentence-level comprehension abilities

We examined Italian 7- to 9-year-olds’ understanding of the connective but when used to relate two events in sentences embedded in short stories. Performance was largely accounted for by the cognitive complexity of the sentence that included the connective and the salience of its meaning (confirmed in a second study with adults). Additional influences on children’s performance were the category of the story in which the critical sentence was embedded and the child’s text comprehension abilities. Further, by 9 years of age, performance resembled that of adults. These findings make an advance in explaining the role of information presented in a text at different levels and an individual’s linguistic abilities in children’s understanding of the connective but in stories and its development

Inferential revision in narrative texts:an ERP study

We evaluated the process of inferential revision during text comprehension in adults. Participants with high or low working memory read short texts, in which the introduction supported two plausible concepts (e.g., ‘guitar/violin’), although one was more probable (‘guitar’). There were three possible continuations: a neutral sentence, which did not refer back to either concept; a no revise sentence, which referred to a general property consistent with either concept (e.g., ‘…beautiful curved body’); and a revise sentence, which referred to a property that was consistent with only the less likely concept (e.g., ‘…matching bow’). Readers took longer to read the sentence in the revise condition, indicating that they were able to evaluate their comprehension and detect a mismatch. In a final sentence, a target noun referred to the alternative concept supported in the revise condition (e.g., ‘violin’). ERPs indicated that both working memory groups were able to evaluate their comprehension of the text (P3a), but only high working memory readers were able to revise their initial incorrect interpretation (P3b) and integrate the new information (N400) when reading the revise sentence. Low working memory readers had difficulties inhibiting the no longer relevant interpretation and thus failed to revise their situation model, and they experienced problems integrating semantically related information into an accurate memory representation

The use of questions to scaffold narrative coherence and cohesion

We examined the quality of 4- to 6-year-olds’ production of narratives from picture sequences. Children (N = 81) first viewed a narrative picture sequence and then completed the narrative production task in each of two orders: either before or after answering a set of questions about the core elements of the story. Narratives elicited after questions were more coherent than those produced before the questions. In contrast, task order did not influence the cohesion of narratives nor the accuracy of responses to questions. An independent measure of memory was related to the gains in narrative coherence after answering questions. The results are discussed in relation to the role of questions as a guide to the structural elements of a narrative and a scaffold for understanding

The effect of prompts on the shared reading interactions of parents and children with Down syndrome

This study examined the effect of prompts on the shared reading interactions of parents and young children with Down syndrome. Eight parents and their children with Down syndrome (aged 4 years, 7 months to 6 years, 9 months) were recorded reading two books together, one of which included 12 question prompts which parents were instructed to ask their child during reading. Though there was considerable variability, parents and children engaged in significantly more extra-textual talk when reading books with embedded prompts than during typical reading. In addition, children showed greater participation, and produced significantly more words and a greater range of words, when reading books with embedded prompts. Prompts had no effect on the complexity of child language. Embedded prompts significantly enhanced the interactions that occurred between parents and young children with Down syndrome during shared book reading and created more opportunities for parents to support their child’s language development. Though further studies are needed, the findings reported here have potentially important implications for the development of shared reading interventions to support language development in young children with Down syndrome

Children see rabbit, not Peter:Young children’s responses to an Anthropomorphic Picture Scale

Previous research suggests that character realism influences children’s responses to stories. This study explored 3- to 7-year-old children’s ratings of thought, feeling, self-knowledge and intention for humans, real animals and anthropomorphised animal characters. Ratings were similar for real and anthropomorphised animals and significantly lower than those for humans. These findings may relate to the observed poorer outcomes following stories depicting anthropomorphic animals, relative to human characters. Individual differences in internal state attribution and corresponding responses to anthropomorphised narratives might be usefully explored with this scale