Comprehension of written sentences as a core component of children's reading comprehension

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that sentence processing is an essential mediatory skill between word recognition and text comprehension in reading. In Experiment 1, a semantic similarity judgement task was used with children from Grade 2 to Grade 9. They had to say whether two written sentences had the same (or very similar) meanings or whether the meanings of the two sentences were very different. As expected, performance improved with age both on the high-frequency words and with increasingly complex sentences. In Experiment 2 with children in Grade 3, scores in written sentence comprehension and vocabulary made the most important unique contribution to the reading comprehension of an expository text. The results are discussed first, in the light of a general framework in which sentence-level skill is at the core of reading comprehension and second, with reference to the issue of reading assessment.The simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986;Hoover & Gough, 1990) defines reading comprehension as a product of word-level decoding and linguistic comprehension (an oral language construct). However, text comprehension in reading implies multicomponent skills, from basic skills involving low-level word reading processes such as phonological awareness, decoding and written word recognition through to higherorder comprehension processes that relate to the construction of coherence and specifically involve the making of inferences and, more generally, background knowledge about the texts to be read Rapp, van den Broeck, McMaster, Kendeou & Espin, 2007). In a simple bottom-up view of reading (i.e. from word level to text level), which finally leads to the construction of the mental model which represents the text, the reader has to read a sequence of sentences and construct the meaning of each of them locally.The general aim of this study is to investigate the importance of sentence-level skill as an intermediate and essential skill situated between word recognition and text comprehension. Sentence-level skill in reading is therefore mobilised and assessed in two experiments. First,

Predicting writing development in dual language instructional contexts: exploring cross‐linguistic relationships

“…It may be that, broadly speaking, linguistic production at the sentence grain is an important precursor of text‐level composition ability. Recent research suggests that linguistic/sentence comprehension is a distinct component step in reading comprehension (Ecalle, Bouchafa, Potocki & Magnan, ). We speculate that the Formulated Sentences task is a particularly strong predictor because it requires production skills that are tightly constrained, lexically and semantically, in a manner quite distinct from general language measures.…”

An analysis of reading skill development using E-Z Reader

“…sentence comprehension ( TeCoPé ; Ecalle et al, 2013): Each child was instructed to decide whether each pair of 24 written sentences had the same meaning or not. Accurate performance requires whatever semantic and syntactic processing is necessary to understand and compare the meanings of the sentences, thus measuring sentence comprehension rather than, for example, either orthographic or phonological knowledge, or general intelligence.…”

The relevance of receptive vocabulary in reading comprehension

“…In these studies, children with a better performance obtained good results in RC. This way, the importance of adequate development of the aspects that influence RC (world knowledge, vocabulary, inference processes, syntactic and semantic integration within the sentences, visual recognition of the words, short-term memory, monitoring, and metacognition) can be pointed out so that the information being transmitted may make sense and the reader can be capable of recognizing the role of each of the words and the way they are organized in a clause (23,24) .…”