There’s no question that language processing and reading comprehension go hand-in-hand.
We know that our vocabulary skills have a huge impact on our ability to understand what we’re reading…
Yet for students with language impairments, the reading strategies they’re learning in school could be missing the mark.
This was definitely the case with my student John, who’d been working on inferential reasoning questions till his face turned blue…but was still struggling.
We thought he was just lazy, until I started digging further. While he seemed like he was just lazy and unmotivated, my evaluation showed that John had poor syntactic and vocabulary skills.
Mistakenly, I’d just skimmed over these skills the last few years.
When it comes to language processing and reading comprehension, we may be putting the cart before the horse if we move right to high-level comprehension before addressing underlying language deficits. I explained why this is a problem in this last post here.
The thing is, some students might not be able to comprehend not because they don’t understand “the gist”, but rather because the processing load during reading is too high.
When students don’t understand the words that they’re reading, can’t decode efficiently, have a poor sense of syntactic structure, and aren’t familiar with the topic, they aren’t likely to remember anything they’ve just read (or listened to).
Asking them to repeatedly “practice” reading, then asking them answers to questions they don’t know about information they can’t remember is like throwing them in to the deep end of the pool before teaching them how to swim.
When too many cognitive resources are spent thinking about how to read individual words or what words mean, we won’t have any energy left to see the “big picture”. This is especially true for students with language processing issues struggling with reading comprehension.
If we fail to understand the relationship between language processing and reading comprehension; we may let students like John fall through the cracks.
But if we understand what skills students need to comprehend in the first place and give them the skills they need, we can change their lives.
Marilyn Nippold (2017) did a study that highlights what those essential skills are.
Nippold did a longitudinal study over the course of a 10-year period that investigated this relationship between language processing and reading comprehension.
She started monitoring a group of children when many of the participants were close to 6 years old; and she divided them in to three groups based on their individual characteristics:
Nippold monitored the following throughout the course of the study: lexical development, syntactic development, word reading, and reading comprehension
The results were as follows:
1) When participants were assessed again around 14 years old, Nippold found that children in the NLI and SLI groups continued to show language and reading deficits in adolescence.
2) Statistical analysis showed that poor reading comprehension was predicted by deficits in lexical ability, syntactic ability, and word reading ability in the early years.
In other words, the children who had deficits in these three areas when they were 6 were significantly more likely to have reading comprehension deficits when they were 14.
Most participants in this study did NOT receive an explicit intervention in those three predictive areas (e.g., lexical knowledge, syntax, word reading).
Turns out, its likely they SHOULD have.
Hindsight is 20/20, isn’t it?
Now, don’t get me wrong. Working on reading comprehension strategies has it’s place.
For the majority of students who have typically developing language skills and who are accurate at reading words, we SHOULD be focusing on comprehension once we make that shift from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”
This is why general education curriculums are so focused on these skills in the later elementary grades on through high school.
But we have to remember the link between language processing and reading comprehension. Our students with processing difficulties may need explicit instruction on the skills that most students learn implicitly.
We need to directly build these weak areas when general education doesn’t cut it. This is by no means a dig against teachers. It’s their job to keep moving on with the curriculum that works for the majority.
They do their best to differentiate, but they can only do so much. That’s why it’s OUR job (along with the special education teacher’s) to fill these holes along the way.
So what “holes” do we need to fill for students with language processing difficulties struggling with reading comprehension?
Nippold sheds some light for us in the discussion and clinical implications section of this 2017 study.
As she accurately explains, the following four areas have a significant impact on reading ability through the school-age years: lexical development, syntax, word reading, and topic knowledge.
In the next post, I’ll explain what you need to know about each of those areas.
For now, the key takeaway is this:
We can’t deny the link between language processing and reading comprehension.
Before we teach our students to grasp the “big picture”, we first need to see if they have all the pieces to put it together.
This includes semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology, and orthography; all which impact our ability to make sense of what we read and hear.
Stay tuned for the next article where I’ll talk about those early indicators that predict reading comprehension skills; and what skills we should be building now to set our students up for success.
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