The contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension in early stages of reading

The contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension in Hebrew was studied in 298 second grade students who practiced two types of inflections, plural and possessive. Reading tasks at the beginning and end of the school year indicated that all improved on all tests in that period. Orthographic word recognition and morphological awareness predicted reading comprehension at the end of year. Students with low (LPD) and high (HPD) phonological decoding skills clearly differed qualitatively in reading comprehension. In the HPD students it was predicted by awareness of possessive inflections; in the LPD students it was predicted by orthographic word recognition ability. The results highlight the importance of examining the different components of morphological awareness in readers with different levels of phonological decoding ability.     

The relationship between reading comprehension strategies and reading attitudes

The aim of this study is to determine the relationship between levels of reading comprehension strategy use, reading attitudes, and the amount of reading per year among elementary school students. The study was conducted with 1316 students (649 girls and 667 boys) attending the fourth and fifth grades of 15 elementary schools in Denizli, Turkey. Stratified Sampling Method was employed to obtain data using Reading Attitude Scale (RAS) and Reading Comprehension Strategies Scale (RCSS). The analyses indicate that reading attitude is a significant predictor of the level of reading comprehension strategies used by students (R² = 0.44). The findings show that there is a negative and low-level relationship (r = ?0.054) between daily time spent reading and the level of strategy used, and a positive and low-level relationship (r = 0.01) between the level of strategy used and the number of books that a child reads per year.     

A longitudinal analysis of English language learners’ word decoding and reading comprehension

This longitudinal investigation examined word decoding and reading comprehension measures from first grade through sixth grade for a sample of Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs). The sample included 261 children (average age of 7.2 years; 120 boys; 141 girls) at the initial data collection in first grade. The ELLs’ word decoding and reading comprehension scores showed quadratic growth over the course of the study. The sample’s reading comprehension, but not their word decoding, began to fall behind the normative sample starting in the third grade. Phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming (RAN), and oral language measures were used as predictors and correlated with growth rates in a manner consistent with past research.     

The contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension in Arabic-speaking second graders

Reading and Writing - We examined the longitudinal contribution of awareness of inflections and derivations to reading comprehension in Arabic, a morphologically rich language, among 734 second...     

The relationship between motivation to read and reading comprehension in chilean elementary students

This study examined the role of reading motivation in reading comprehension achievement of 1070 Chilean third, fourth, and fifth-grade students enrolled in public and private schools. Students were assessed in Spanish reading comprehension and were administered the Motivation to Read Profile from Gambrell, Palmer, Codling and Mazzoni (1996), at the beginning and end of the school year. Results showed that motivation to read at the beginning of the school year was significantly associated with gains in reading comprehension skills. When disaggregating motivation into self-concept and value of reading, only self-concept of reading significantly predicted gains in reading comprehension. Moderation analyses showed that students that started the year with lower reading comprehension and higher motivation to read, had significantly better reading comprehension at the end of the school year, than their peers who started with lower reading motivation. The pedagogical implications are discussed.

     

Phonological recoding,orthographic decoding,and comprehension skills during reading acquisition

To become skillful readers, children have to acquire the ability to translate printed words letter by letter into phonemic representations (phonological recoding) and the ability to recognize the written word forms holistically (orthographical decoding). Whereas phonological recoding is the key for learning to read and useful for recognizing unknown or low-frequent words, orthographical decoding is often more efficient and takes less time, thus facilitating reading processes on the sentence and text level. Several studies with English-speaking children provided evidence for the relevance of the two routes but the question whether and to what extent both word recognition skills contribute to reading comprehension in young German readers requires further clarification. Based on data from a cross-sectional study with German primary school children we investigated whether and to what extent both types of word recognition skills are associated with sentence (N = 666) and text comprehension skills (N = 149) and how these relationships develop from Grade 2 to 4. The results indicate that both phonological recoding skills and orthographical decoding skills are important for reading comprehension skills. Their relative weight does not change across grade levels.     

Preschool morphological training produces long-term improvements in reading comprehension

We evaluated the effect of morphological awareness training delivered in preschool (8 months before school entry) on reading ability at the end of grade 1 and 5 years later (in Grade 6). In preschool, one group of children received morphological awareness training, while a second group received phonological awareness training. A control group followed the ordinary preschool curriculum. The comparison between each training condition and the control condition is quasi experimental, whereas the comparison between the morphological and phonological treatments is randomized at group level. In Grade 1 children in the morphological awareness training group had significantly higher scores than children in the control group on both word reading and text reading measures, but no differences were found between the experimental groups. In Grade 6 children in the morphological awareness training group had significantly higher scores compared with the control group on a latent measure of reading comprehension, whereas the children in the phonological awareness training group did not differ from the controls; although the experimental groups did not differ significantly from each other. The results suggest that early training in morphological awareness can have long-term effects on children’s literacy skills.     

The relationship between reading achievement and morphological word analysis in deaf and hearing students matched for reading level

This study extends the findings of Gaustad, Kelly, Payne, and Lylak (2002), which showed that deaf college students and hearing middle school students appeared to have approximately the same morphological knowledge and word segmentation skills. Because the average grade level reading abilities for the two groups of students were also similar, those research findings suggested that deaf students' morphological development was progressing as might be expected relative to reading level. This study further examined the specific relationship between morphologically based word identification skills and reading achievement levels, as well as differences in the error patterns of deaf and hearing readers. Comparison of performance between pairs of deaf college students and hearing middle school students matched for reading achievement level shows significant superiority of younger hearing participants for skills relating especially to the meaning of derivational morphemes and roots, and the segmentation of words containing multiple types of morphemes. Group subtest comparisons and item analysis comparisons of specific morpheme knowledge and word segmentation show clear differences in the morphographic skills of hearing middle school readers over deaf college students, even though they were matched and appear to read at the same grade levels, as measured by standardized tests.     

The relationship between reading and listening comprehension: shared and modality-specific components

This study aimed to increase our understanding on the relationship between reading and listening comprehension. Both in comprehension theory and in educational practice, reading and listening comprehension are often seen as interchangeable, overlooking modality-specific aspects of them separately. Three questions were addressed. First, it was examined to what extent reading and listening comprehension comprise modality-specific, distinct skills or an overlapping, domain-general skill in terms of the amount of explained variance in one comprehension type by the opposite comprehension type. Second, general and modality-unique subskills of reading and listening comprehension were sought by assessing the contributions of the foundational skills word reading fluency, vocabulary, memory, attention, and inhibition to both comprehension types. Lastly, the practice of using either listening comprehension or vocabulary as a proxy of general comprehension was investigated. Reading and listening comprehension tasks with the same format were assessed in 85 second and third grade children. Analyses revealed that reading comprehension explained 34% of the variance in listening comprehension, and listening comprehension 40% of reading comprehension. Vocabulary and word reading fluency were found to be shared contributors to both reading and listening comprehension. None of the other cognitive skills contributed significantly to reading or listening comprehension. These results indicate that only part of the comprehension process is indeed domain-general and not influenced by the modality in which the information is provided. Especially vocabulary seems to play a large role in this domain-general part. The findings warrant a more prominent focus of modality-specific aspects of both reading and listening comprehension in research and education.

     

The effects of morphological and syntactic knowledge on reading comprehension in spanish speaking children

Reading and Writing - Reading comprehension is a complex task requiring many underlying skills. Syntactic awareness and morphological awareness are two such skills that have been shown to be...     

Effect of phonological and morphological awareness on reading comprehension in Hebrew-speaking adolescents with reading disabilities

This research explored phonological and morphological awareness among Hebrew-speaking adolescents with reading disabilities (RD) and its effect on reading comprehension beyond phonological and word-reading abilities. Participants included 39 seventh graders with RD and two matched control groups of normal readers: 40 seventh graders matched for chronological age (CA) and 38 third graders matched for reading age (RA). We assessed phonological awareness, word reading, morphological awareness, and reading comprehension. Findings indicated that the RD group performed similarly to the RA group on phonological awareness but lower on phonological decoding. On the decontextualized morphological task, RD functioned on par with RA, whereas in a contextualized task RD performed above RA but lower than CA. In reading comprehension, RD performed as well as RA. Finally, results indicated that for normal readers contextual morphological awareness uniquely contributed to reading comprehension beyond phonological and word-reading abilities, whereas no such unique contribution emerged for the RD group. The absence of an effect of morphological awareness in predicting reading comprehension was suggested to be related to a different recognition process employed by RD readers which hinder the ability of these readers to use morphosemantic structures. The lexical quality hypothesis was proposed as further support to the findings, suggesting that a low quality of lexical representation in RD students leads to ineffective reading skills and comprehension. Lexical representation is thus critical for both lexical as well as comprehension abilities.     

Prosodic reading,reading comprehension and morphological skills in Hebrew‐speaking fourth graders

Employing prosody skilfully, one of the cornerstones of fluent reading, is an indicator of text comprehension. Morphological knowledge has been shown to underlie lexical acquisition and to be related to reading development. The relationship between reading comprehension, prosodic reading and morphological knowledge was investigated in 51 Hebrew‐speaking fourth‐grade students aged 9–10. Participants were tested on comprehension of two stories and on appropriate prosodic reading of one of them. Their prosodic reading was compared with an agreed prosodic map compiled from experts' reading. Participants were also administered a battery of morphological tasks. All three domains, including almost all of their component parts, were strongly correlated. The multiple regression in steps showed that morphology and reading comprehension each contribute to prosodic reading, while morphology and prosody each contribute to reading comprehension. The connection between reading comprehension and prosodic reading is however moderated by good morphological skills.     

Development of decoding,reading comprehension,vocabulary and spelling during the elementary school years

The goal of this study was (1) to investigate the development of decoding(efficiency), reading comprehension, vocabulary and spelling during theelementary school years and (2) to determine the differences between poor,average and good performers with regard to the development of theseskills. Twice each year two standardized tests for each skill wereadministered. For two successive periods, one of the tests for each skill wasthe same. To describe the development in terms of a latent variable evolvingacross grades, the structured-means version of the structural equationmodel was used. The growth was expressed in terms of effect size. Withrespect to the first question, clear seasonal effects were found for readingcomprehension, vocabulary and spelling, while the seasonal effect fordecoding efficiency was restricted to the early grades. Progress tended tobe greater from fall to spring than from spring to fall. For decodingefficiency, and to a lesser degree for vocabulary and spelling, growthshowed a declining trend across grades. For reading comprehension, theprogress in grade 2 was lower than the progress in grade 3, but progresswas declining across higher grades. With respect to the second question,it appeared that initially low performers on reading comprehension,vocabulary and spelling tended to show a greater progress, especially inperiods where the largest amount of instruction was given. Although it wasfound that the low, medium and high ability groups remain in the sameorder, as far as their means are concerned, these findings do not confirmthe existence of a Matthew effect for reading comprehension, vocabularyand spelling. For decoding efficiency no clear differential effect could befound: the gap between the poor and good performers did not widen overtime for this skill.     

The role of question type and reading ability in reading comprehension

Performance on a standardized reading comprehension test reflects the number of correct answers readers select from a list of alternate choices, but fails to provide information about how readers cope with the various cognitive demands of the task. The aim of this study was to determine whether three groups of readers: normally achieving (NA), poor comprehenders (CD), with no decoding disability, and reading disabled (RD), poor comprehenders with poor decoding skills, differed in their ability to cope with reading comprehension task demands. Three task variables reflected in the question-answer relations that appear on standardized reading comprehension tests were identified.Passage Independent (PI) question can be answered with reasonable accuracy based on the reader's prior knowledge of the passage content.Inference (INFER) questions required the reader to generate an inference at the local or global test level.Locating (LOCAT) questions require the reader to match the correct answer choice to a detail explicitly stated in the text either verbatim or in paraphrase form. The relations among reader characteristics, cognitive task factors and reading comprehension test scores were analyzed using a structural relations equation with LISREL. It was found that the three reading groups differed with respect to the underlying relationship between their performance on specific question-answer types and their standardized reading comprehension score. For the NA group, a high score on PI was likely to be accompanied by a low score on INFER, whereas in the CD and RD groups, PI and INFER are positively related. The finding of a negative relationship between background knowledge and inference task factors for normally achieving readers suggests that even normal readers may have comprehension difficulties that go undetected on the basis of a standardized scores. This study indicates that current comprehension assessments may not be adequate for assessing specific reading difficulties and that more precise diagnostic tools are needed.