Teaching Reading Comprehension to Students with Language Deficits
Reading comprehension skills are a critical component of being able to succeed in school, yet the strategies put in place do not always help those children that have language deficits, making them fall further behind in their reading comprehension abilities.
Reading comprehension itself is formed of many different skills, each one mastered with time. However, those children with language deficits may have difficulty due to deficits in reading ability, lexical development, and syntactic development. If these underlying issues aren’t addressed, poor comprehension of text will result.
These skills also build off of one another and further improve in time. Meaning that if one area is lacking, this could affect other skillsets.
In addition to the importance and difficulty of reading comprehension skills, the expository text is the main genre that textbooks are written in, and this is one of the most challenging genres to comprehend.1 So, any child with deficits is being further challenged, meaning that these underlying issues must be addressed in order to help the child succeed.
Understanding text passages requires word reading skills, lexical development, syntactic development, and topic knowledge.
Word reading skills involve rapid recognition, decoding, phonological awareness, and more. To be able to read a text accurately, a child must be able to have an understanding of how different speech sounds and letters interact.2 This is a skill that improves over time as the child gets older and interacts with more challenging texts. If the child never built the foundation for word reading skills, they fall further behind.
Lexical development
Lexical development is the ability to learn new words. This is looking at context clues, root words, prefixes, suffixes, etc. to figure out the meaning of a word. Lexical development can be improved through explicit instruction.3
Syntactic Development
Syntax is the rule system of how words are combined to form meaning. When reading a sentence, each word has to be in its proper place to express the correct information. If a reader can’t interpret the different parts of a sentence or understand how the placements contribute to the meaning, they will not be able to understand the text they are reading, let alone be able to answer more difficult reading comprehension questions.
Topic Knowledge
Topic knowledge is an important part of understanding a text. This topic knowledge is built from the other reading that has been done. Since topic knowledge is gained through reading, those children who have trouble with reading comprehension fall further behind because they may have never been able to build a good foundation.
Common Techniques and Why they don’t always work
Some common comprehension strategies include “previewing the passage for its likely content, monitoring comprehension by asking oneself questions about the passage, finding the main idea, and summarizing the key points in one’s own words.”4
These common techniques rely on the fact that a child has the word reading skills, lexical development, syntactic development, and topic knowledge required to be able to grasp the meaning of the text. However, if a child lacks these skills, they lack the foundation to understand the texts. It would not benefit the child to scan the text or summarize key points if the child lacks the foundation to be able to understand the text.
The solution to this is to address the child’s problem areas and work on improving word reading, and lexical, and syntactic deficits.5
The Iowa Project
The Iowa Project was a longitudinal study of the language development of children over a 10-year period. The study found that those children that exhibited deficits in kindergarten are more at risk to continue experience language deficits through school and struggle with reading comprehension.
Conclusion
This study recommends that an SLP should identify a child’s weaknesses, and “intervention should be carried out in a systematic, intense, focused, and explicit manner that targets each student’s underlying weaknesses, with the goal of improving the student’s ability to read independently and comprehend expository textbooks.”6
Once the underlying weaknesses are being addressed, other reading comprehension strategies can begin to be implemented, such as breaking down the text structure, comprehension strategy instruction, and vocabulary and knowledge building. Breaking down text structure is a great tool to help break down difficult texts, such as those in the expository genre. Since this is a common form for educational texts, doing an activity to help break down what’s commonly expected in an expository text can be helpful.
Comprehension strategy instruction is explicit instruction in using things like graphic organizers, questions, and visual aids to help a child comprehend the text. This can be implemented once a child begins to build foundational reading skills.
Vocabulary and knowledge building help prepare a child to understand a text. As discussed earlier, topic knowledge is built from previous reading experiences. However, it is helpful to prepare a child for a text by highlighting key vocabulary words that they may encounter or go over some basic information about a topic. This also helps to refresh the memory, and repeating information helps with comprehension. /p>
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1. Nippold, Marilyn A. “Reading Comprehension Deficits in Adolescents: Addressing Underlying Language Abilities,” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 48, no. 2 (2017): 125, https://doi.org/10.1044/2016_LSHSS-16-0048.
2. Nippold, “Reading Comprehension Deficits,” 126.
3. Ibid, 126.
4. Ibid, 127.
5. Ibid, 127.
6. Ibid, 129.
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Nippold, Marilyn A. “Reading Comprehension Deficits in Adolescents: Addressing Underlying Language Abilities,” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 48, no. 2 (2017): 125-131, https://doi.org/10.1044/2016_LSHSS-16-0048.
Sedita, Joan. “The Science of Reading Comprehension,” Keys to Literacy, 3 October 2021, https://keystoliteracy.com/blog/the-science-of-reading-comprehension/.