short professional development opportunities. For example, during an impact team meeting or professional learning community. You can also complete this as a book or chapter study. Participants may view all or part of the series as a tandem companion or supplemental resource for supporting a study of the book, The Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties.
Module 5, Reading Comprehension. Session 1, The Simple View of Reading and Reading Comprehension. Hello, this is David Kilpatrick and I am your presenter for this series of 13 webinars.
And through these webinars, teachers will learn about the reading research, particularly as it pertains to assessment, preventing, and overcoming reading difficulties. Here's an overview of the 13 modules. Each module contains between one and seven sessions.
And in this module, we have two sessions. And the first session has to do with how the simple view of reading helps us understand reading comprehension. As a result of viewing this session, participants will be able to explain the simple view of reading and how it helps us better understand reading comprehension difficulties, and also to determine if reading comprehension problems are the result of word reading problems or language problems or both. The simple view of reading was covered in module 3.1, so if you have not viewed module 3.1, I strongly recommend that you go back and take a look at that, and that will make the material in this module much more clear.
The simple view of reading has been supported by nearly 200 direct studies and hundreds more indirect studies. A recent study, pretty large scale, focusing on comprehension, shows that the simple view of reading can virtually account for all the skills involved in reading comprehension. Using a statistical concept, it accounts for a vast amount of variance in skilled versus not skilled reading comprehension.
What that means is that there really are not underlying mysterious factors that researchers don't know about that will affect reading comprehension. Recall from module 3 that reading, defined as reading comprehension by the original developers of the simple view of reading, which was Philip Goff and colleagues, is the product of what they call decoding, meaning level reading and linguistic comprehension which we're referring to simply as language comprehension. Basically the formula is R equals D times LC meaning reading comprehension is a product of word reading and language comprehension.
You may also recall from Module 3 that the simple view of reading indicates that there can be three types of reading problems. One is dyslexia. Dyslexia is poor word-level reading. And this can include compensators. This is an issue...
We're not going to probe that deeply here, but I do want to mention that children who are compensators may have good language skills, and they may appear to have skilled word reading, but word reading is a struggle, so their comprehension suffers as a result of poor word reading, but they're harder to catch simply because they are so good at compensating for their poor word reading that their word reading looks fairly typical. And such children are most easy to detect if you do a time nonsense word reading test with them or a phonemic awareness test with them, particularly one that has a timing element such as the phonological awareness screening test. Hyperlexia involves children who can read the words just fine, but they struggle in understanding what they read. Researchers use hyperlexia to use the term hyperlexia, but they also use the term specific reading comprehension impairment. And they use this term to distinguish it from situations in which word-level reading gets in the way of comprehension.
And then you have the combined type, and we're going to focus just on the latter two because both of them involve problems with general language comprehension. I've had the fortunate opportunity to work with students kindergarten through 12th grade, and I've also had the fortunate opportunity to be introduced to the simple view of reading back in the late 20s. late 1990s.
As a result, I have used the Simple View framework as my guiding principle for doing evaluations of children. And based on the Simple View, one question I began to ask, which I found very useful, was when a teacher approached me and said a child was struggling with reading comprehension, I would say, what if you read the passage to the student? Did she understand it then? And the answer to that was very useful. If the teacher said yes, that suggests to me that the reading comprehension problem is a direct byproduct of poor word reading.
If you're struggling with the words and all your focus is on the words, it's hard to understand the meaning. However, if the teacher says no, it doesn't necessarily rule out a word reading problem because a child could be a student who has that combined problem of word reading and comprehension. But it does indicate that there's a problem. there is a problem with either language comprehension or possibly attention. I think it's important to point out that there is some research to suggest that children with attention problems may do better in reading comprehension than they do in language comprehension.
Perhaps this is because when they're doing reading, they're focusing their attention on their reading, but if they're just listening, maybe they're more likely to zone out, so to speak, and have a lapse of attention. So we can't assume that just because a child's listening comprehension may not be adequate, that it's directly related to language comprehension. It may be related to attention.
The person that can answer these questions the best is a speech-language pathologist. They have the background, the knowledge, and the test instruments to distinguish among the various reasons as to why a child may be struggling in listening or language comprehension. So if they indicate that a child wouldn't understand even if you read it to him or her, there may be an issue with more... general language skills or attention or both.
Another question that can be asked before anybody pulls out any test kits or makes any sort of special education referrals is when the child reads, does he or she seem to read effortlessly and fluently or does it seem to be effortful? Now, if the answer is yes, the child seems to read effortlessly, then there's a good chance that there's a general language problem related to the child's reading comprehension. However, as mentioned earlier, Earlier, there's an exception to this, and that can be compensators.
Some compensators come across like they're pretty fluent, but yet all their mental energy is involved in trying to sound fluent, and there's really not much left over to comprehend. But generally speaking, if the child's not a compensator, this is a good indicator that there may be a language issue that is interfering with reading comprehension. If, on the other hand, the teacher says, no, the child's reading is not very fluent and not very effortless, that suggests that word reading is a contributing factor.
Now once again, the child could have the combined type of problem. They could have language problems and word reading problems. So the answer of no doesn't distinguish between those two. In the speech pathology field, they talk about the semantic aspects of language, grammatical, syntactic, phonological, and pragmatic. And what we have to point out is that not all of them have the same amount of information that has to be learned to master the language.
in the same level of trajectory. So for example, when it comes to phonology or grammar and even syntax, there's a certain limited number of things children need to learn. But when it comes to semantics, that is meaning and vocabulary, background knowledge and pragmatics, many different aspects of language functioning, those are pretty wide open and something we continue to learn throughout our whole life.
So children can become pretty competent at the grammar, the syntax, the basic phonology of the language, and a limited pool of the semantic aspect of language. And they can come across as having normal language in everyday speech. Everyday language consists of only about 2,000 to 3,000 words that get used over and over and over again.
And this gets mastered by even children with language problems by late elementary school. And certainly English learners pick up on this most quickly. Terms that are designed to teach adults language, like Pimsleur or or Rosetta Stone, they get people to learn those two to three thousand words that you're going to need for everyday language.
But a competent adult has a semantic lexicon that's into the tens of thousands of words. So what happens is you have children who in everyday language they seem like they have pretty average skills for the vocabulary. In fact, they struggle in vocabulary because they have a very limited pool or language base beyond what they need to get through on a day-to-day basis. In summary, reading comprehension is based on two very broad skills, word level reading and language comprehension. When a student struggles in reading comprehension, it's very useful to find out if that student would comprehend the passage if it were read to him or her.
Some students struggle in reading comprehension based on difficulties in language comprehension. Some students struggle in reading comprehension based upon poor word reading. And some students struggle as a result of both. And we must always keep in mind that just because a third grader, fourth grader, all the way up to twelfth grader seems to have normal language skills and daily conversation, we can't assume that they don't have a broader language problem. That may be a contributor to their reading comprehension difficulty.
A screening done by a speech pathologist would be one way to take a look at this if there are any concerns of this nature. What has been your understanding of reading comprehension difficulties? And how, if at all, does the simple view clarify your understanding? In the next session in this module, we're going to examine the various skills that are necessary for language comprehension and therefore for reading comprehension. Module 5 Reading Comprehension.
Session 2. Skills Required for Language Comprehension and Reading Comprehension. Hello, this is David Kilpatrick and I am your presenter for these 13 on-demand webinars. And these webinars are designed to get the research on reading out of the technical journals and into the hands of the people who need it the most. And as a result of going through all of these webinars, participants will learn about what research has to say about assessment of reading difficulties, prevention, and overcoming reading difficulties. We are now in Module 5. You can see an overview of all 13 modules.
And Module 5 has two sessions. This is the second session. As a result of this module, participants will be able to identify the critical skills needed for language comprehension and describe what a situation model is and how it affects reading comprehension. And finally, they'll be able to indicate what are the other critical skills that contribute to the situation model and therefore to reading comprehension.
Beyond about third grade, in students who are skilled at the word level reading, the correlation between language comprehension tests and reading comprehension tests are extremely high. In fact, they're so high that a reading comprehension test is a very high chance that a student test will correlate with a language comprehension test about as strong as two language comprehension tests correlate with each other or two reading comprehension tests correlate with each other. So that's a pretty strong correlation. I had mentioned in the previous session that there are some children, particularly those with attention problems, whose listening comprehension scores on a formal test may be lower than their reading comprehension.
And I speculated as to why that might be. Perhaps if children are reading, they're focusing their attention on reading and comprehending, but if they are just sitting and listening, maybe they are more likely to let their mind wander. While there are differences between written and spoken language for sure, from a functional standpoint, the latter is more or less the former written down. So you understand the spoken language you are in a great position to understand the written language and vice versa reading comprehension and language comprehension require a number of very important skills and we're going to just touch upon those in this session one of the ways of organizing a number of the skills that are important for language comprehension and reading comprehension is a situation model or mental model a situation model or mental model is what we build as we read we pull together a number of the the other factors that you're going to see below to help us understand what's going on in a passage that we're reading or to help us understand a verbal communication that someone is relaying to us.
Vocabulary. In order to understand what someone is saying we need to know the meaning of the words that they're using. In order to understand what we read we need to understand the words that are being used in that passage.
Grammar and syntax. Grammar has to do a lot of facets of language. Could be verb tense, could be possessives, could be could be singular, plural, and any one of a number of other key features of language.
Syntax, sometimes grouped together with grammar, has to do with word order. Background knowledge is also very important for building a situation model. It's hard to build a situation model in terms of trying to understand what's going on if you don't have the background knowledge for it.
Attention, of course, is very important because comprehension requires focus and keeping track of what is being said or what is being read. Working memory is important because working memory refers to the temporary memory buffer that we use to keep track of what we're thinking about right now. And if you have a weaker working memory capacity compared to others, you're going to be able to keep track of information in a less adequate fashion than others.
And so when we're comprehending... things sort of drop out. Some of the details drop out. We've all had the experience of reading a very long sentence and there was just too much in that sentence. It expanded beyond our working memory and so there we had to go back and reread part of it in order to process it.
Well if your working memory is more limited things are going to drop out either in verbal communication or in written communication. Inferencing is so important because so much of what needs to be understood is not actually stated. You need to infer it. And I'll give you an example of that in an upcoming slide.
Comprehension monitoring is a process of recognizing whether or not you do understand the communication, whether written or verbal. We've all had the experience where maybe we're reading late at night and we get to the end of the paragraph and we say, wow, I don't think I understood any of that. I wasn't paying enough attention. My mind was wandering. And we go back and reread.
That's an example of comprehension monitoring. You recognize that you didn't understand it. Another important element of understanding Both oral and written language is understanding story structure and genre. Now I do want to mention that many of these skills can be taught and can be reinforced starting in preschool. For example, you read to children and they can develop a sense of story structure.
The development we have on this list of skills can go both ways in terms of language comprehension helping reading comprehension and our reading comprehension helping our language comprehension. So children don't have to learn story structure and genre through reading books. They should learn a lot about that before they're ever even able to read through their preschool years into kindergarten and first grade being read to and having the teacher talk about those elements. That's also true of all the other things that are mentioned here. Inferencing, comprehension monitoring, grammar, vocabulary, etc.
And of course, background knowledge. And then there's visual spatial imagery skills. These seem to show virtually no correlation with word level reading.
But interestingly, there have been a number of studies. It's never been a major area of study for reading comprehension, language comprehension, but it has been a source of study way back into the 30s, 40s, 50s, right up through till today. And there are probably just a couple few dozen studies to show this. A fairly recent study showed that visual spatial skills examined in kindergarten and predicted eighth grade reading comprehension after controlling for general intelligence.
Now we don't know exactly why this is important, but it may contribute to the situation model. You may be picturing in your mind what's going on as the various words are understood and the background knowledge falls into place. But that's rather speculative.
We would like to know more about that. So let's talk a little bit more about building the situation model. To build the situation model, We need to bring to bear many of those other elements on the previous slide, like vocabulary, background knowledge, and inferencing. Read the following taken from a research study by Okel and Garm.
This is a very simple passage that most kindergartners or first graders would understand totally. In fact, I read this to my kindergarten and my preschool grandsons not too long ago and asked them a bunch of questions. of questions and the kindergartner got everyone right and the preschooler got all but one right. Think of the inferencing that has to go on.
Think of the background knowledge. First of all, you have to understand that there's an expectation that you bring a present to a birthday party. Furthermore, there's an expectation that that present is something purchased rather than made.
Also, you have to know what a piggy bank is, and you have to know what it means that you shook it and it was empty. There are a number of things that have to be inferred, and I came up with every possible question about this that I could, and sure enough, they were hard to stump, a kindergartener and a preschooler. But that shows you inferencing. Women that have comprehension problems don't necessarily inference things very well. So, this is something important in terms of building a situation model.
If you don't know the background, certainly if you don't know the vocabulary, and you don't make inferences based upon the background and the vocabulary, you're not going to understand the passage. With English learners, think of that very long list that was on that earlier slide. There's a lot for them to try to learn and keep track of as they're acquiring English. Vocabulary, grammar, syntax, those are all going to be an issue in terms of comprehension. Grammar and syntax are much more limited in terms of what they have to learn, and they're going to likely pick up on those much more quickly.
But vocabulary, and certainly background knowledge, takes years for them to catch up. As mentioned in the previous session, The everyday language can be acquired much more quickly. And one of the problems is that as they develop the everyday language, they can fool us into thinking that their language is superior to what it really is. There's a long trajectory for children where English is their second language or third language to catch up with their peers. If they enter in first, second, third grade, it may not be until high school that they've caught up.
But that doesn't mean that they're not progressing and then they're not doing well along the way. And background knowledge certainly can pose an issue. Working memory can be an issue even if they have average working memory.
Why? Because even those of us that have average working memory, that working memory can be overloaded with too much information. And when they're trying to figure out grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and all these other elements at once, it is going to be very difficult for them. I'd like to recommend two outstanding resources to pursue this further.
Probably the best all-around resource available to us right now on reading comprehension is Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension by three reading researchers who have been studying reading comprehension for decades, and they do outstanding work. This is just a brief little book, little over 100 pages. It's amazing how well they were able to communicate the most important findings from research into such an understandable format.
I need to give a financial disclaimer here. I don't make a penny off recommending. but I wish I did because I recommend it all the time.
It's an outstanding resource. And the same could be said about the best resource available on vocabulary. Once again, written by researchers, but written in a very digestible, understandable fashion.
When word-level reading is average or better, reading comprehension and language comprehension share most of the same critical skills. There are numerous skills needed for language comprehension and reading comprehension, such as vocabulary, background knowledge, inferencing, and working memory. English learners are going to struggle in this area for many years to come and their development must be supported for many years to come. We have to be careful not to be fooled by their language issues because they seem very competent in everyday language. How might a teacher promote the critical skills for reading comprehension across the content areas?
Next up is Module 6, and it's the first of four modules devoted to assessment of children with reading difficulties.