Not a year goes by that I don’t see an inferencing goal for a student with language issues.
It reminds me of a former student of mine, “John” (which I told you about in this last article) was no different.
John was the “lazy and unmotivated” student who turned in sloppy written work with incomplete answers and gave off-the-wall answers to comprehension questions.
We’d been working on making inferences for the last year (like stating the main idea) with little progress.
Because John didn’t appear to have the best attitude toward learning, the staff had started to assume that his problems were effort-based.
Yet after I did the first portion of my language assessment for his 3-year re-evaluation using the Listening Comprehension Test-2 (Bowers, Huisingh, & LoGuidice, 2006), I started to change my thinking.
John’s scores on a number of the subtests fell in the mid 70s, showing that he actually did have lingering language processing issues.
The thing I love about The Listening Comprehension Test-2 is that it taps deep receptive language processing from multiple angles.
Students need to apply knowledge of semantic, syntax, and grammar all at once as they listen to auditory messages that get more and more difficult as the test goes on.
Students also need to compose specific, concise answers, so there’s an expressive component (even though this is technically a “listening” test). There are a number of high-level cohesion tasks, such as recalling details, explaining meanings of words, and making inferences.
John was saved from falling through the cracks because of an assessment I did “just in case” he was still struggling in some areas.
The sad thing is that many students are pegged as behavior problems when they really are just confused and frustrated.
We may assume a student isn’t trying, but really they just don’t understand what they’re reading and hearing.
Or, we know they’re struggling, and we’re drilling main idea and inferencing questions like crazy, but the student is still not getting better.
Then the student gets frustrated and shuts down completely. Like John did.
With John, I’d been working on making inferences, stating the main idea, and describing details for ages; but he’d still scored low on these areas.
I didn’t want to do more of what wasn’t working.
It just didn’t make sense. If John wasn’t making inferences and comprehending, why wasn’t he getting better when I worked on these things?
So I dug deeper by also giving him the Test of Language Development-I4 (Hammill & Newcomer, 2008).
I gave The TOLD-I4 because I wanted more information about other things that could be causing comprehension issues, like semantic, syntax, grammar.
While the Listening Comprehension Test-2, requires a student to integrate many linguistic skills at once; it doesn’t isolate them.
The TOLD-I4, on the other hand, DOES isolate these skills.
Students need to identify sentences with grammatical errors, combine and create sentences with appropriate syntax, explain word relationships by naming the category, define multiple meaning words, and identify pictures that go along with semantic information (more details on this test in the Testing Time Saver for Language Evaluations).
Low and behold, John’s TOLD-I4 scores showed delays in syntax, grammar, and vocabulary.
It all started to become clear. John wasn’t improving because I hadn’t addressed the root cause of the problem.
Common sense would imply that a student struggling with “comprehension” tasks would need direct work on the tasks themselves (such as stating the main idea, explaining supporting details, making inferences).
Yet as Scott (2009) pointed out, some students may struggle with comprehension due to underlying issues with vocabulary and syntax.
In other words, we won’t be able to comprehend while we’re reading/listening if we don’t understand the words and sentences.
My next post will dive deeper in to Scott’s article, A case for the sentence in reading comprehension.
If you’re treating students with poor comprehension who struggle with making inference and stating the main idea, you’ll want to check it out.
Because as it turns out, many of the students we treat may be missing a critical piece needed to be successful readers.
Stay tuned, as there’s more to this story…like what I actually did with John when I realized what he needed.
In the mean time, if you’re not sure how well your students comprehend language, you’ll want to consider giving them the Listening Comprehension Test-2. You can get a free summary with scripts for report-writing here.
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