Reading comprehension development: Presentation

Reading comprehension development: Presentation of the special issue ∗

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Maryse Bianco1 , Hakima Megherbi , Monique Sénéchal and 4 Pascale Colé 1 Université Grenoble-Alpes, France 2 EA4403 UTRPP, Université Paris 13-Sorbonne Paris Cité, Villetaneuse, France 3 Carleton University, Canada 4 Aix-Marseille Université, Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, CNRS UMR 7290,

France

ABSTRACT The papers presented in this special issue highlight three theoretical topics central to the reading comprehension research. The first relates to the component skills of reading comprehension performance. Among the multiple linguistic and cognitive skills involved, vocabulary retained much of the researchers’ attention. Three papers described the influence of vocabulary on various aspects of comprehension. The second topic is tied to the assessment of reading comprehension and the analysis of individual differences. Despite the multidimensional nature of the reading comprehension process, most assessment tools provide a single measure of performance. Four papers focused on analyzing the specific dimensions of comprehension being assessed by existing and novel tests. The third topic is relevant to the teaching of comprehension and the prevention of reading comprehension difficulties. A final paper presented the findings of an intervention study designed to enhance oral language in kindergarten. Le développement de la compréhension en lecture : présentation du numéro spécial RÉSUMÉ Les articles présentés dans ce numéro spécial s’organisent autour de trois questions théoriques majeures dans le champ des recherches sur la compréhension en lecture. La première est liée à la description des habiletés prédictives de la performance. Parmi les multiples habiletés linguistiques et cognitives impliquées, le vocabulaire a fortement retenu l’attention des chercheurs. Trois articles décrivent son influence et ∗ Corresponding author: Maryse Bianco,Université Grenoble-Alpes, Laboratoire des sciences de l’éducation,

Bâtiment SHM, BP 47, F 38040 Cédex 9. E-mail: [email protected]

L’année psychologique/Topics in Cognitive Psychology, 2014, 114, 613-621

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r Hakima Megherbi r Monique Sénéchal r Pascale Colé

ses relations aux processus de compréhension. La deuxième question est centrée sur le problème de l’évaluation et de l’analyse des différences individuelles. Malgré la nature multidimensionnelle de l’activité de compréhension en lecture, la plupart des tests existant fournissent une mesure unitaire de la performance. Le problème consiste à savoir quelles sont les habiletés exactement évaluées par ces épreuves. Quatre articles sont consacrés à cette question. L’enseignement de la compréhension est récemment devenu une préoccupation majeure et représente la troisième question abordée. Le développement précoce du langage oral étant très prédictif de la compréhension ultérieure en lecture, l’accent a été mis sur les recherches interventionnelles destinées à améliorer la maitrise du langage oral à l’école maternelle. La dernière recherche présentée dans ce numéro aborde cette question.

This special issue provides an overview of emerging topics in the rapidly growing field of research on reading comprehension development. Reading comprehension in children has increasingly been in the foreground of interest for researchers and educational policy leaders. Current definitions consider that reading comprehension is a complex cognitive activity that requires building a coherent representation of the text by using a wide variety of skills and knowledge. Thus, successfully understanding texts requires at least three related processes: accurate identification of the printed words; analyses of the semantic and syntactic relations among words and sentences; and relating the ideas in texts to one’s prior knowledge. Reading comprehension skills and knowledge vary with age, experience, instruction, context, and motivation. As empirical studies are rapidly accumulating, three main theoretical questions are especially salient and structure this special issue: the identification of component skills; the reliable assessment of individual differences; and how to improve reading comprehension.

1. WHAT ARE THE COMPONENTS OF READING COMPREHENSION? The identification of component skills is essential to models of reading comprehension. According to the Simple View of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), reading comprehension is hypothesized to be the product of two necessary components: word identification and listening comprehension (see also Bishop & Snowling, 2004; Tunmer & Chapman, 2012). Empirical support for the Simple View has been found in several studies—in particularly large scales twin studies (Keenan, Betjemann, Wadsworth, DeFries, & Olson, 2006). While grounded in a simple model, the comprehensive description of its two components is far from simple (Tilstra, McMaster, van den Broek, Kendeou, & Rapp, 2009). Moreover,


Current issues in reading comprehension development

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the components’ relative contribution differs across types of orthography as well as during the course of reading development (Florit & Cain, 2011). Hence, reading comprehension is a complex activity for which the question of assessment needs to be discussed (Betjemann, Keenan, Olson, & DeFries, 2011; Cutting & Scarborough, 2006; Paris & Stahl, 2005). We also need to describe what are the relations during the course of development between the components involved in reading comprehension. These components include decoding and words identification, vocabulary, morphology, syntactic and semantic analyses of sentences, as well as inference making. We also need to examine how these components are related to non-verbal factors like cognitive efficiency and working memory, as well as other factors such as reading motivation, experience, and instruction (McNamara & Magliano, 2009; van den Broek, White, Kendeou, & Carlson, 2009). Lastly, there is a need to better understand the relations between reading comprehension and the writing processes (Fayol, 2014). In this section of the special issue, two studies examined the relation between oral vocabulary and reading comprehension and one of them further investigated the relation between reading comprehension and written composition. Ouellette and Shaw (this issue) investigated the link between oral vocabulary and reading comprehension by more precisely defining and measuring theoretically-derived facets of oral vocabulary. They distinguished between the number of lexical entries (vocabulary breadth) and the quality of this semantic knowledge (vocabulary depth). Vocabulary depth included both measures of definitional knowledge and awareness of word associations. This latter measure was taken to reflect the organization of the lexical-semantic system. Results with 12-year-old Canadian children showed that reading comprehension was influenced directly by word reading and vocabulary breadth. Reading comprehension was also influenced indirectly by lexical-semantic organization. These results revealed an intricate set of associations between different aspects of vocabulary and reading comprehension. As such, it makes a nice contribution to the more general question of the relations between semantic knowledge and reading. Cain and Oakhill (this issue) also examined links among vocabulary breadth, vocabulary depth, and inference making. The originality of the research resides in the researchers’ attempts to distinguish various levels of inference making that are necessary to reading comprehension. The findings with 10- and 11-year-old British children showed a more nuanced picture than anticipated: both vocabulary breadth and depth were associated with global inference making, but only vocabulary depth remained uniquely associated in more stringent regression analyses. The


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findings of this study provide information on how the richness of children’s vocabulary knowledge might help them integrate textual information with their knowledge base during reading. The hypothesis that reading comprehension and essay writing share common knowledge sources and cognitive skills was explored by Allen, Snow, Crossley, Jackson and McNamara (this issue). They focused especially on vocabulary knowledge and higher-level components skills of reading comprehension, namely, text memory, text inferences, as well as knowledge access and integration. Interestingly, they found, in a sample of American college students, differences in predictor skills across domains. Knowledge access and text inferences (marginally) uniquely predicted reading comprehension beyond vocabulary knowledge. In contrast, none of these skills uniquely predicted writing performance once vocabulary knowledge was entered in the equation. These results confirm the pivotal role played by vocabulary in text comprehension and production, but they also highlight the specificity of knowledge access to reading comprehension. There is certainly a need to pursue this line of research.

2. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AND READING COMPREHENSION ASSESSMENT Reading comprehension difficulties represent a great challenge for educators given that about approximately 10% of children experience specific reading comprehension difficulties at the end of primary school (Cain & Oakhill, 2012). Poor comprehenders are broadly defined as having difficulty understanding what they read despite adequate word reading skills. Several studies have shown that poor comprehenders have difficulty with numerous skills such as grammatical sensitivity (Catts, Adolf, & Weismer, 2006), inference making (Oakhill & Cain, 2012), comprehension monitoring (McNamara, 2007; van den Broek et al., 2009), working memory (Cain, Oakhill & Bryant, 2004), and text structure (Caretti, Re, & Rafè, 2013; Cragg & Nation, 2006). Moreover, these children often obtain lower scores on tests of verbal IQ (Hulme & Snowling, 2011). However, there is heterogeneity in the skill profiles of poor comprehenders (Cain & Oakhill, 2006). Unfortunately, comparing studies is difficult because of differences in the assessment of poor comprehenders. Current issues include the identification of fundamental verbal and non-verbal weaknesses in poor comprehenders and the identification of the sources of these deficits (Ricketts, 2011). The four studies in this section of the special issue are



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beginning to address these issues and one of these studies extends them to a population with autism spectrum disorder. Sabatini, O’Reilly, Halderman, and Bruce (this issue) present an exploratory study on the implementation of an innovative scenario-based reading comprehension assessment tool (SBA). The researchers designed a computer-based reading comprehension tool that offers purposeful reading activities. The use of technology allowed the presentation of scenarios that set the larger purpose for the reading comprehension task and the simulation of teacher and peer interactions. The analysis of the performance of 426 American sixth graders showed that the SBA has adequate psychometric properties and strong correlations with traditional measures of reading comprehension. The SBA design is likely to broaden the scope of reading comprehension assessment because it takes into account higher-level cognitive skills –especially multiple-source integration and evaluation that allow deep understanding and learning from text. The authors delineate a promising and challenging line of research in the reading comprehension assessment field. In line with a growing body of research showing that differences in the identification of poor comprehenders are due to differences in linguistic and processing demands across reading comprehension tests (Keenan, Betjemann, & Olson, 2008), Papadopoulos, Kendeou and Shiakalli (this issue) present a longitudinal study aimed at distinguishing the types of poor readers identified by three reading comprehension tests in a sample of 213 Greek children. Children were assessed on a number of linguistic and cognitive predictors of reading in kindergarten, grades 1 and 2. Poor readers diagnosed on the Curriculum Based Measurement-Maze Test exhibited low performance on a number of component skills (rapid automatic naming, phonological ability and word reading fluency and accuracy) at each time points. In contrast, poor readers diagnosed by two other tests, the Woodcock-Johnson Passage Comprehension test and a story recall test, performed less well on word reading fluency and phonological skills in grades 1 and 2 only. Theses results confirm that different tests are identifying distinct and unique poor reading comprehenders profiles. The issue of diagnostic was also addressed in the research by Keenan, Hua, Meenan, Pennington, Willcutt and Olson (this issue). With a large sample of 1522 American children and adolescents aged 8 to 19 years, the researchers evaluated the impact of selection methods on the prevalence, consistency, and cognitive profiles of poor comprehenders. Participants were assessed on a series of reading and listening comprehension tests, on word and pseudoword reading, and finally on IQ, attention and working memory. Taken together, the results show that the identification of poor


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comprehenders varies as a function of criteria and tests used. Moreover, the cognitive profiles of children and adolescents also varied as a function of selection methods. The findings of this study invite us to think seriously about the nature of comprehension difficulties and how to identify poor comprehenders reliably. Similar to poor comprehenders, children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) also show below-average reading comprehension in spite of averaged-level word reading skills. In their study, Henderson, Clarke and Snowling (this issue) compared the reading comprehension performance of two groups of British participants matched on word reading: 49 children and adolescents with ASD aged 7 to 15 years and 49 typically-developing children and adolescents. The findings showed that the prevalence of children presenting a discrepancy between reading comprehension and word reading—a low level in reading comprehension and normal level in word reading—was higher in participants with ASD than in the typically-developing reading-matched sample. Moreover, participants with ASD performed more poorly on phonological decoding than the reading-match participants. In fact, phonological decoding was a significant predictor of reading comprehension for participants with ASD, but not for the reading-matched participants. These findings are important because the combined weaknesses in phonological decoding and vocabulary for children and adolescents with ASD might explain their impairment in reading comprehension.

3. INSTRUCTION AND REMEDIATION There is a long-standing tradition in the study of instructional methods to prevent or remediate word reading difficulties. In contrast, teaching and training methods to improve text comprehension have been less explored. One way to improve reading comprehension is surely to train oral language comprehension skills. Studies on teaching oral skills in preschool settings were shown to improve oral comprehension skills and to predict reading comprehension in grade 1 for both typically-developing (Bianco, Bressoux, Doyen, Lambert, Lima, Pellenq, & Zorman, 2010; Bianco, Pellenq, Lambert, Bressoux, Lima, & Doyen, 2012) and at-risk children (Boywer-Crane, Snowling, Duff et al., 2008). Another way to improve reading comprehension is to teach comprehension strategies (Clarke, Snowling, Truelove & Hulme, 2010; McNamara &Magliano, 2009; Trabasso & Bouchard, 2002). However, more data are needed, especially



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longitudinal findings, to understand better which skills are at work at a particular age, how they interact, and how they predict later performance (see for example Verhoren, van Leeuwe, & Vermeer, 2011). We also need to assess how language and metacognitive skills that enable the emergence of comprehension monitoring are related during training and in development. The study presented in this last section addressed some of these important issues. Blanc (this issue) examined whether an intervention that targeted inference making would enhance 4- and 5-year-olds’ ability to understand a story. The intervention focused on children’s ability to understand emotional inferences because a character’s emotional response is strongly connected to the causal dimension of a story. French-speaking children participated in one of three conditions: one group was trained to make emotional inferences from televised stories, one from auditory stories and the third group did not participate to any training session. The ability to make emotional inferences was assessed in both an aural and a video situation in order to test the transfer of inference-making skills from one medium to another. For each test story, children were to select out of an array of four the smiley that represented the story character’s emotional response (i.e., happiness, anger, sadness, or fear). Children in the video condition showed enhanced performance as compared to the children in the other conditions. The observed benefits were present on both the aural and video testing situations and were still significant six weeks after training. This study provides support for the idea that skills shown to be central to comprehension can be trained at an early age.

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