Reading comprehension precursors: Evidence of the simple view of reading in a transparent orthography

Abstract

The Simple View of Reading (SVR) proposes that reading comprehension depends on two general processes –language comprehension and word recognition– and that the contribution of these known processes to reading comprehension varies in time. Specifically, the contribution of word recognition decreases, and the contribution of language comprehension increases with student progress. The purpose of this study was to test the SVR in a large sample of 4,750 Dominican public-school students from second (n = 2,399) and fourth grade (2,351) and determine the contribution of phonological awareness within the SVR. The study found that word recognition and language comprehension explained 80% of the variance in reading comprehension regardless of grade. A quantile regression showed that, as reading comprehension progresses, language comprehension’s predictive power increases, and word recognition’s predictive power decreases. A structural equation model conducted on each grade separately showed that the contribution of word recognition toward reading comprehension remained stable between second and fourth grade. This means that, although the dynamism of the SVR components follows the same pattern reported in the literature, the students evaluated here might reach reading automaticity later than expected. Therefore, more attentional resources need to be allocated toward decoding. The study found that the contribution of phonological awareness toward word recognition increases from second to fourth grade, confirming that students are taking longer than expected to obtain reading automaticity and still going through an overt effortful decoding stage rather than a covert phonological recoding stage, making reading more effortful.

External validity of a reading intervention for primary education as shown in Dominican sixth grade students performance on the National Diagnostic Evaluation

“…Project USAID-Read provides additional information on how this cognitive process takes place in this context by having conducted multiple studies on reading comprehension precursors. These studies have not only validated the project's efficacy (Sánchez-Vincitore et al, 2020) but have also provided support for the simple view theory of reading and described the predictive weights of each subcomponent of reading comprehension (Sánchez-Vincitore et al, 2022).…”

Validation of the Dominican system for measuring early childhood development

“…The study findings demonstrate that SIMEDID passes three elements of a checklist of critical methodological elements to consider when appraising a childhood development assessment tool: (1) the instrument measures domains affected by the risk factor or intervention; (2) reliability and validity of the instrument in the population of interest; (3) sensitivity of the instrument to identify changes; (4) logistics and methodology is suitable for evaluating the outcome; and (5) consideration of control group ( Sabanathan et al, 2015 ). SIMEDID passes the first two elements from this checklist, as it measures specific domains of early childhood development previously identified as risk factors in the Dominican Republic, such as the sociodemographic and psychosocial factors that predict childhood development ( Sánchez-Vincitore and Castro, 2022 ) and low levels of oral language comprehension in school-aged children that should be addressed during early childhood development before children enter primary school ( Sánchez-Vincitore et al, 2020 , 2022 ) among other risk factors. In addition, it passes the fourth element, given that the logistic and methodology was specifically designed to assess the outcome in the Dominican context.…”

Predictors of reading comprehension and profiling of poor readers in Croatian: educational and clinical perspectives

“…Language comprehension: According to Sánchez-Vincitore et al (2022) , language comprehension within the SVR can be tested through vocabulary, morphosyntactic ability, and oral discourse comprehension tests. Since discourse level integrates various language skills and knowledge, we decided to use it as a measure of language comprehension.…”

“…For example, phonological decoding through the phonological route depends heavily on phonological awareness and the functionality of the phonological working memory, i.e., phonological information must be stored temporarily, while the reader connects the series of phonemes and graphemes ( Wagner and Torgesen, 1987 ). Orthographic processing depends on rapid automatized naming (RAN), i.e., the cognitive ability to retrieve lexical items quickly to recognize words, as well as on a number of other factors that are more environmentally conditioned, such as length of exposure to written language or methods of reading instruction ( Kirby and Savage, 2008 ; Torppa et al, 2016 ; Sánchez-Vincitore et al, 2022 ).…”

“…In transparent languages, this proportion is even higher. For example, in a Dominican Spanish study, Sánchez-Vincitore et al (2022) found that word recognition and language comprehension explained 80% of the variance in reading comprehension after 4 years of reading instruction.…”