Background and Purpose
Research conducted in the 1980s and more recently has suggested that
children with learning disabilities (LD) have difficulties with reading
comprehension that are the result of broadly based language problems and
not limited to simple difficulties with word recognition. Since reading
comprehension is crucial to school success, it is essential to
understand the difficulties children with LD face as they encounter new
text and to identify instructional approaches that focus on learning and
using the many skills that are needed for successful reading.
This research synthesis was conducted to critically review recent
contributions to the body of research on reading comprehension in
students with LD with the goal of enhancing current classroom practices
and identifying avenues for future research. These points serve as
background information for the following discussion:
- Successful reading comprehension is correlated with oral reading fluency and vocabulary knowledge. However, interventions that focus on improving fluency or vocabulary do not necessarily increase reading comprehension, especially of long passages.
- Students with LD often show signs of giving up too quickly when faced with a difficult passage. This so-called task persistence, a skill that must be acquired by all readers, is especially important for successful reading of expository text, such as history and science textbooks, newspapers, and voter pamphlets.
- Children with LD, who have a history of academic difficulties, have documented gaps in grade-appropriate knowledge of history, geography, and other subjects. These knowledge gaps interfere with their understanding of material they encounter in new texts and compound their reading comprehension problems.
Findings
An analysis of three recent research reviews brings the following
issues and findings to the forefront of reading comprehension research.
What is the role of self-monitoring in reading comprehension?
So-called active readers learn to monitor how well they understand
what they are reading, as they read. When reading difficult material,
these students engage in beneficial self-monitoring strategies such as
rereading portions of the text and trying to figure out the meaning of
unfamiliar words central to understanding it. In contrast, students with
LD often fail to realize that they must pay attention to how well they
understand a text as they read so that they can go back and reread as
necessary. Typically, students with LD must learn several
self-monitoring techniques, such as asking themselves questions after
reading a passage or summarizing in their own words the material they've
read. While reading a story (a narrative text), they might try to
predict what will happen next. Learning to make predictions helps
reading comprehension.
The ability to reflect on how well a reading task is progressing is a
critical component of reading comprehension. Students who are taught a
number of strategies to use as they read, such as asking themselves
questions as they read and summarizing what they read, generally
experience more improvements in comprehension than students who are
taught a single, specific comprehension skill. It is essential for
students to learn "repair strategies" to use when they find themselves
not understanding the text they are reading.
Repeated readings of a passage make it significantly easier for students to recall its important content. Repeated readings of the same passage is an easy strategy to implement in real classroom situations.
Repeated readings of a passage make it significantly easier for students to recall its important content. Repeated readings of the same passage is an easy strategy to implement in real classroom situations.
Although students with LD can be taught to use self-monitoring
techniques, it is considerably more difficult for these students to
generalize these skills, or apply them to other reading situations.
Students frequently do not continue the comprehension strategies that
they are taught after completion of the study unless they are asked to.
It appears that intense, long-term interventions utilizing multiple
self-monitoring interventions may be the most effective approach.
Students with LD process information inactively, and they have
difficulty differentiating relevant and irrelevant associations.
Possible solutions include techniques that force students to focus
attention on the material being read and help them more readily identify
the theme of a narrative.
What are the contributions of text structures to reading comprehension?
Skills in discerning and using text structures (the way reading
material is organized) are important to understanding texts. Students
with LD have trouble learning about the structures of stories. In
addition, they typically recall less about stories they've read and
cannot easily identify the important information in stories. The most
useful text structure is referred to as story grammar, which is the way
narrative texts are organized. That is, there are characters, a setting,
problems, solutions to the problems, etc. Students with LD know less
about narrative text structure than other students. This lack of
knowledge interferes with comprehension. Fortunately, narrative text
structure can be taught, and when it is, comprehension improves.
Expository writing, the kind of texts found in newspapers and history
books, for example, presents LD students with even greater challenges.
Expository writing typically contains a variety of organizational or
text structures that are more difficult to identify. Thus, the tactics
that may help when reading stories, such as identifying the main story
elements and processing them, are often less effective with expository
texts.
Peer-assisted learning strategies (PALS) improve comprehension and
oral reading skills. In addition to having students reread text, PALS
also has children work directly on comprehension by summarizing what
they've read, identifying the most important information, and predicting
what may happen next.
Although peer-assisted learning has shown strong benefits, additional
research is necessary to determine whether peers have the skills to
explain to another student how they handle the difficulties they
encounter while reading. It's clear that students can help with practice
and that practice is essential for internalizing strategies, but it's
not clear to what extent proficient readers can actually teach less
proficient readers.
Recommendations
Reading comprehension interventions are among the most effective interventions among children with LD.
Students with LD need to learn an array of strategies to enhance
their understanding of the narrative and expository material they read.
With regard to expository text, more emphasis should be placed on a fluid approach to self-monitoring skills. Too few studies have looked at ways to improve comprehension of expository text. New areas of research are emphasizing that comprehension of expository text should focus on helping students use an array of strategies flexibly rather than having them adhere rigidly to text structure approach, as they might while reading a narrative text or story.
With regard to expository text, more emphasis should be placed on a fluid approach to self-monitoring skills. Too few studies have looked at ways to improve comprehension of expository text. New areas of research are emphasizing that comprehension of expository text should focus on helping students use an array of strategies flexibly rather than having them adhere rigidly to text structure approach, as they might while reading a narrative text or story.
It appears that more successful interventions teach kids multiple
strategies with the goal of having them internalize the strategies.
Limited evidence suggests that internalization occurs with more intense
interventions-usually longer and more frequent instructional times.
Socially mediated instruction, of which peer-assisted learning
strategies (PALS) is one example, seems to hold considerable promise. In
these situations, students learn to process verbally with a peer or
group of peers what they've read verbally. After reading a passage, for
example, students or a student and a teacher discuss the content of the
passage, ask each other questions about it, and in narrative texts,
predict what may happen next.
Frequent, ongoing discussions about the meaning of the text, in which
the teacher models the array of strategies and tools that good readers
use to make sense of text, is a promising approach to reading
comprehension instruction.
Finding ways to help students generalize their newly acquired reading
comprehension skills is essential. It's important to learn how these
skills can be transferred to other academic areas and what needs to be
done to make sure that students either continue using the specific
strategies they've learned after the instructional intervention ends or
internalize the essential parts of the strategy so that improvements in
reading comprehension continue.
To date, student learning occurs on measures aligned to the focus of
the intervention. So, if students learn to make predictions, for
example, they tend to do quite well on tasks that ask them to make
predictions. These types of closely aligned measures are called
experimenter developed measures. When measures are not closely aligned
to the specific focus of the intervention, as is typically the case with
standardized measures, the learning outcomes are less impressive. One
goal of reading comprehension research is to develop intervention
approaches that have a larger impact on standardized measures, which
suggest a more generalized or broad-based effect of the intervention.
This document was prepared for the Keys to
Successful Learning Summit held in May 1999 in Washington, D.C. Keys to
Successful Learning is an ongoing collaboration sponsored by the
National Center for Learning Disabilities in partnership with the Office
of Special Education Programs (US Department of Education) and the
National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (National
Institutes of Health).
The purpose of this initiative is to translate
research and policy on learning disabilities into high standards for
learning and achievement in the classroom, and to take action at the
local, state and federal levels to ensure that all students, including
those with learning disabilities, are afforded the highest quality
education.
Keys
to Successful Learning is supported by a coalition of national and
regional funders as well as a broad range of participating education
organizations.