Reading Comprehension and Language Intervention

>> Amy Hansen:  Welcome to today's Expert e-Seminar, “Reading Comprehension and Language Intervention,” presented by Dr. Dee Lance.  My name is Amy Hansen and I'll be your moderator for today's course.  At this time I am very honored to introduce Dr. Dee Lance this afternoon.  Dr. Lance is an Associate Professor of Speech-Language Pathology at the University of Central Arkansas, where she teaches courses in child language acquisition and disorders.  She conducts research in the areas of reading comprehension and phonological processing.  Dr. Lance has more than 22 years of experience working with children who have phonological deficits, language disorders and language-based reading disabilities.  So welcome, Dee.  Thank you so much for joining us.

(Applause)

>> Dr. Dee Lance:  Hello.  I guess it is good morning or good afternoon, depending upon wherever you actually are.  It is morning for me in Arkansas, which is where I am.  Just so that I can get some background about who I'm talking to, how many of you, if you'll raise your hand, are school-based therapists?  Okay.  How many work with preschoolers?  Any students out there?  Okay.  Anybody out there in nursing homes?  Good deal.  I'm thinking the majority of you are school based.  A good friend who works in a hospital and I do a lot of work together, and we do believe that some of the things that we use for children in language can also be appropriate for adults.  When we talk about reading comprehension, I'll aim most of my examples at children, because those are the examples that I have.  But some of these can be applicable for those individuals who have lost reading ability due to TBI or some kind of adult-onset language impairment.   

Reading Comprehension

I'm so glad you all are listening about reading comprehension.  I have been playing in the area of reading comprehension for about 27 years now.  It's my interest, and it started when I was working on my Master's Degree and one of my professors was looking at auditory processing disorders and reading ability in children.  She hooked me, and I have been thinking about reading and language disability for the bulk of my career. 

As we get started, let’s just define reading comprehension so that we're all on the same page.  The National Reading Panel in 2000 gave us this lovely definition: 

“This is an active problem solving process in which readers relate the ideas in the text to their own knowledge and experiences, which allows the reader to create a mental construct in memory.” 

I love that word "problem solving" because I do believe we use language to solve problems.  Think about reading comprehension as a linguistically based problem solving process.  I think it speaks to me anyway.  I think one of the critical components about this definition is that it puts some of the responsibility of reading comprehension not just on the text but on the reader.  One of the things that we know - you'll hear me say this a couple of times as we spend our hour together - is that world knowledge is a predictor of reading comprehension ability.  I am always amazed that those kids that are in the AP (Advanced Placement) classes tend to get to take more field trips than those children who are in the regular or even special classrooms, when it really should be reversed.  Those kids in AP, they already have some world knowledge.  They already have the ability to glean information from texts, whereas children with disabilities or typical learners probably need a little bit more world experience as they approach learning.  But then, nobody is asking me for my opinion on those kinds of things!  You have to relate your own knowledge and experiences, and this process allows the reader to create a mental construct in memory. 

Another definition that I have that is real quick and easy for me to spit out when I talk is that reading comprehension is just “making meaning out of print.”  That is quick and dirty.  But it kind of gets to the same point.  One of the things that I'll say now and I'm going to say again is that we need to be explicitly teaching reading comprehension strategies to individuals. Vaughn and her colleagues have survey data that say that most teachers in the classroom do not teach reading comprehension.  That is because typical language learners really can do this implicitly.  They'll figure it out.  It is our language impaired kids that have problems doing it and figuring it out.  I could talk all day about this definition, so I must move on. 

Here’s a little bit of a break down in terms of reading comprehension.  The reader must figure out how print represents words, translate print into sound, formulate a representation of the information by building new meaning, and integrate old with new information.  I had a good professor, Harold Peterson, who defined semantics for me in a way it had not been.  Semantics is word meaning, but semantics is also the relationship of words within sentences and the relationship of sentences within paragraphs and then the larger text.  We really do have to take semantics beyond a single word - we'll talk about that a little later - because we have to formulate a representation of the information and build new meaning based on that.  That is that problem solving process.  We have to integrate old and new information. 

At the same time, we must consider, as interventionists, motivation for reading.  Why does somebody want to read?  I know why I want to read, but for children, what will motivate them to read?  We have to deal with why they are reading, if it is for pleasure or if it is for information.  I know as I look at my daughter's science text, I find it so incredibly visually distracting, because there are blurbs of information in one little text box and pictures over here and one text box there.  I really do like a linear text.  What they're reading is also important as well as the environment in which they're having to read.