Vocabulary and syntactic knowledge factors in 5th grade students’ reading comprehension
Keywords:
Adolescent Readers, Vocabulary Development, Syntactic Awareness, Reading ComprehensionAbstract
In this study, we examined 5th grade students’ levels of vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness relative to their reading comprehension performance. The aim was to explore the contributions of vocabulary and syntactic awareness as potential sources of reading comprehension difficulty for these readers. Overall, we found that both vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness contributed in significant yet unique ways to students’ reading comprehension performance. Students who showed weaknesses in vocabulary and syntax also performed poorly on measures of reading comprehension. Additionally, we found that syntactic awareness explained a small amount of additional variance in reading comprehension beyond what was explained by vocabulary. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of research and practice addressing the relationships among syntax, vocabulary, and reading comprehension for more and less skilled readers.
Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
References
Baumann, J. F., Kame’enui, E. J., & Ash, G. (2003). Research on vocabulary instruction: Voltaire redux. In J. Flood, D. Lapp, J. R. Squire &, J. Jensen (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts (pp. 752-785). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Beck, I. L., Perfetti, C.A., & McKeown, M.G. (1982). Effects of long-term vocabulary instruction on lexical access and reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 506-521.
Bentin, S., Deutsch, A., & Liberman, LY. (1990). Syntactic competence and reading ability in children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 48, 147-172.
Blackmore, A. M. & Pratt, C. (1997). Grammatical awareness and reading in grade 1 children. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 43, 567-590.
Bowey, J. A., & Patel, R. K. (1988). Metalinguistic ability and early reading achievement. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 367–383.
Bozo, W. A. (1951). A factorial study of reasoning and closure factors. Psychometrika, 16, 361-386.
Cain, K. (2007). Syntactic awareness and reading ability: Is there any evidence for a special relationship? Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 679-694.
Cain, K. (2010). Reading development and difficulties. West Sussex, United Kingdom: British Psychological Society & Blackwell, Ltd.
Cain, K., & Oakhill, J. (2007). Reading comprehension difficulties: Correlates, causes, and consequences. In K. Cain & J. Oakhill (Eds.), Children’s comprehension problems in oral and written language: A cognitive perspective (pp. 41-75). New York: Guilford Press.
Carlisle, J. F. (2004). Morphological processes that influence learning to read. In A. Stone, E. Silliman, B. Ehren, & K. Apel (Eds.), Handbook of language and literacy: Development and disorders (pp. 318–339). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Chall, J. S., Jacobs, V. A., & Baldwin, L. E. (1990). The reading crisis: Why poor children fall behind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clark, N. L. (1972). Hierarchical structure of comprehension skills. Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia: A.C.E.R.
Clarke, P.J., Snowling, M.J., Truelove, E., & Hulme, C. (2010). Ameliorating children’s reading comprehension difficulties: A randomised controlled trial. Psychological Science, 21(8), 1106–1116.
Davis, F. B. (1942). Two new measures of reading ability. Journal of Educational Psychology, 33, 365-372.
Davis, F. B. (1944). Fundamental factors of comprehension in reading. Psychometrika, 9, 185-197.
Davis, F. B. (1968). Research in comprehension in reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 3, 499-545.
de Jong, P.F., & der Leij, A.V. (2003). Development changes in the manifestation of a phonological deficit in dyslexic children learning to read a regular orthography. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, 22-40.
Demont, E., & Gombert, J.E. (1996). Phonological awareness as a predictor of decoding skills and syntactic awareness as a predictor of comprehension skills. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 66, 315-332.
Dixon, P., LeFevre, J., & Twilley, L. C. (1988). Word knowledge and working memory as predictors of reading skill. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 465-472.
Faul, P., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A-G., & Buchner, A. (2007). G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39 (2), 175-191.
Gelderen, A. V., Schoonen R., Glooper, K. D., Hulstijin, J., Simis, A., Snellings, P., & Stevenson, M. (2004). Linguistic knowledge, processing speed, and metacognitive knowledge in first-and second-language reading comprehension: A componential analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1, 19-30.
Gregg W., Donahue P., & Dion, G. (2007). The nation’s report card: 12th grade reading and mathematics 2005 (NCES 2007-468). Washington DC: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.
Hammill, D., & Newcomer, P. L. (1988). Test of Language Development-Intermediate (TOLD-I:3). San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.
Hunt, J. T. (1953). The relation among vocabulary, structural analysis, and reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 44, 193-202.
Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Layton, A., Robinson, J., & Lawson, M. (1998). The relationship between syntactic awareness and reading performance. Journal of Research in Reading, 21, 5-23.
Leikin, M. (2002). Processing syntactic functions of words in normal and dyslexic readers. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 31(2), 145-163.
MacGinitie, W.H., MacGinitie, R. K., Maria, K., Dreyer, L. G., & Hughes, K. E. (2000). Gates-MacGinitie reading tests (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Riverside.
Muter, V., Hulme, C., Snowling, M., & Stevenson, J. (2004). Phonemes, rimes, vocabulary, and grammatical skills as foundations or early reading development: Evidence from a longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 40, 6650681.
Nagy, W.E., & Herman, P.A. (1987). Breath and depth of vocabulary knowledge: Implications for acquisition and instruction. In M.G., McKeown & M.E. Curtis (Eds.). The nature of vocabulary acquisition (pp. 19-35). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Nation, K., Cocksey, J., Taylor, J., & Bishop, D. (2010). A longitudinal investigation of early reading and language skills in children with poor reading comprehension. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51, 1031–1039.
National Center for Education Statistics. (2012). The nation’s report card: Vocabulary results from the 2009 and 2011 NAEP reading assessments (NCES 2013–452). Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). The report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2005). Early child care and children's development in the primary grades: Results from the NICHD study of early child care. American Educational Research Journal, 43, 537–570.
Nippold, M.A. (1998). Later language development: The school-age age and adolescent years. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.
Nippold, M.A. (2004). Research on later language development: International perspectives. In R. Berman (Ed.), Language development across childhood and adolescence (pp. 1-9). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Oakhill, J., & Cain, K. (2007). Introduction to comprehension development. In J. Oakhill and K. Cain, Children’s comprehension problems in oral and written language. (pp. 1-40). New York: Guilford Press.
Oakhill, J., Cain, K., & Bryant, P. E. (2003). The dissociation of word reading and text comprehension: Evidence from component skills. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 443-468.
Proctor, C., Carlo, M., August, D., & Snow, C. (2005) Native Spanish-speaking children in English: toward a model of comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 9, 246-156.
Ruddell, M. R. (1994). Vocabulary knowledge and comprehension: A comprehension process view of complex literacy relationships. In R. B. Ruddell, M. R. Ruddell, & H. Singer (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (pp. 414–447). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Scott, C. (2004). Syntactic contributions to literacy learning. In C.A., Stone, E.R. Silliman, B.J. Ehren, & K. Apel (Eds.). Handbook of language and literacy: Development and disorders (pp. 340-362). New York, NY: Gilford Press.
Shiotsu, T., & Weir, C.J. (2007). The relative significance of syntactic knowledge and vocabulary breadth in the prediction of reading comprehension test performance. Language Testing, 24, 99-128.
Snow, C. (2002). Reading for understanding: Toward an R & D program in reading comprehension. Arlington, VA: Rand Education.
Snow, C. E., & White, C. (2008). Word generation. Boston, Mass: Strategic Education Research Partnership.
Snow, C.E., Burns, M.S., & Griffin, P. (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Stanovich, K.E., & Cunningham, A.E. (1992). Studying the consequences of literacy within a literate society: The cognitive correlates of print exposure. Memory & Cognition, 20, 51-68.
Tabachnick, B. G., & Fidell, L. S. (2013). Using multivariate statistics (6th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Thorndike, R.L., (1973). Reading as reasoning: A study of mistakes in paragraph reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 8, 323-332.
Torgesen, J.K., Wagner, R.K., Rashotte, C.A., Burgess, S., & Hecht, S. (1997). Contributions of phonological awareness and rapid automatic naming ability to the growth of word reading skills in second to fifth grade children. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1, 161-185.
Tunmer, W. E., & Hoover, W. (1992). Cognitive and linguistic factors in learning to read. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri & R. Treiman (Eds.), Reading Acquisition (pp. 175-214). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Tunmer, W.E., & Bowey, J.A. (1984). Metalinguistic awareness and reading acquisition. In W.E. Tunmer, C. Pratt, & M.L. Herriman (Eds.), Metalinguistic awareness in children (pp. 144-168). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Whipple, G. (Ed.). (1925). The twenty-fourth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education: Report of the National Committee on Reading. Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing.
Willows, D. M., & Ryan, E. B. (1986). The development of grammatical sensitivity and its relationship to early reading achievement. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 253–266.
Beck, I. L., Perfetti, C.A., & McKeown, M.G. (1982). Effects of long-term vocabulary instruction on lexical access and reading comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 506-521.
Bentin, S., Deutsch, A., & Liberman, LY. (1990). Syntactic competence and reading ability in children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 48, 147-172.
Blackmore, A. M. & Pratt, C. (1997). Grammatical awareness and reading in grade 1 children. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 43, 567-590.
Bowey, J. A., & Patel, R. K. (1988). Metalinguistic ability and early reading achievement. Applied Psycholinguistics, 9, 367–383.
Bozo, W. A. (1951). A factorial study of reasoning and closure factors. Psychometrika, 16, 361-386.
Cain, K. (2007). Syntactic awareness and reading ability: Is there any evidence for a special relationship? Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 679-694.
Cain, K. (2010). Reading development and difficulties. West Sussex, United Kingdom: British Psychological Society & Blackwell, Ltd.
Cain, K., & Oakhill, J. (2007). Reading comprehension difficulties: Correlates, causes, and consequences. In K. Cain & J. Oakhill (Eds.), Children’s comprehension problems in oral and written language: A cognitive perspective (pp. 41-75). New York: Guilford Press.
Carlisle, J. F. (2004). Morphological processes that influence learning to read. In A. Stone, E. Silliman, B. Ehren, & K. Apel (Eds.), Handbook of language and literacy: Development and disorders (pp. 318–339). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Chall, J. S., Jacobs, V. A., & Baldwin, L. E. (1990). The reading crisis: Why poor children fall behind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clark, N. L. (1972). Hierarchical structure of comprehension skills. Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia: A.C.E.R.
Clarke, P.J., Snowling, M.J., Truelove, E., & Hulme, C. (2010). Ameliorating children’s reading comprehension difficulties: A randomised controlled trial. Psychological Science, 21(8), 1106–1116.
Davis, F. B. (1942). Two new measures of reading ability. Journal of Educational Psychology, 33, 365-372.
Davis, F. B. (1944). Fundamental factors of comprehension in reading. Psychometrika, 9, 185-197.
Davis, F. B. (1968). Research in comprehension in reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 3, 499-545.
de Jong, P.F., & der Leij, A.V. (2003). Development changes in the manifestation of a phonological deficit in dyslexic children learning to read a regular orthography. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, 22-40.
Demont, E., & Gombert, J.E. (1996). Phonological awareness as a predictor of decoding skills and syntactic awareness as a predictor of comprehension skills. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 66, 315-332.
Dixon, P., LeFevre, J., & Twilley, L. C. (1988). Word knowledge and working memory as predictors of reading skill. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 465-472.
Faul, P., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A-G., & Buchner, A. (2007). G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39 (2), 175-191.
Gelderen, A. V., Schoonen R., Glooper, K. D., Hulstijin, J., Simis, A., Snellings, P., & Stevenson, M. (2004). Linguistic knowledge, processing speed, and metacognitive knowledge in first-and second-language reading comprehension: A componential analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 1, 19-30.
Gregg W., Donahue P., & Dion, G. (2007). The nation’s report card: 12th grade reading and mathematics 2005 (NCES 2007-468). Washington DC: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.
Hammill, D., & Newcomer, P. L. (1988). Test of Language Development-Intermediate (TOLD-I:3). San Antonio, TX: The Psychological Corporation.
Hunt, J. T. (1953). The relation among vocabulary, structural analysis, and reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 44, 193-202.
Kintsch, W. (1998). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Layton, A., Robinson, J., & Lawson, M. (1998). The relationship between syntactic awareness and reading performance. Journal of Research in Reading, 21, 5-23.
Leikin, M. (2002). Processing syntactic functions of words in normal and dyslexic readers. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 31(2), 145-163.
MacGinitie, W.H., MacGinitie, R. K., Maria, K., Dreyer, L. G., & Hughes, K. E. (2000). Gates-MacGinitie reading tests (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Riverside.
Muter, V., Hulme, C., Snowling, M., & Stevenson, J. (2004). Phonemes, rimes, vocabulary, and grammatical skills as foundations or early reading development: Evidence from a longitudinal study. Developmental Psychology, 40, 6650681.
Nagy, W.E., & Herman, P.A. (1987). Breath and depth of vocabulary knowledge: Implications for acquisition and instruction. In M.G., McKeown & M.E. Curtis (Eds.). The nature of vocabulary acquisition (pp. 19-35). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Nation, K., Cocksey, J., Taylor, J., & Bishop, D. (2010). A longitudinal investigation of early reading and language skills in children with poor reading comprehension. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51, 1031–1039.
National Center for Education Statistics. (2012). The nation’s report card: Vocabulary results from the 2009 and 2011 NAEP reading assessments (NCES 2013–452). Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). The report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2005). Early child care and children's development in the primary grades: Results from the NICHD study of early child care. American Educational Research Journal, 43, 537–570.
Nippold, M.A. (1998). Later language development: The school-age age and adolescent years. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.
Nippold, M.A. (2004). Research on later language development: International perspectives. In R. Berman (Ed.), Language development across childhood and adolescence (pp. 1-9). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Oakhill, J., & Cain, K. (2007). Introduction to comprehension development. In J. Oakhill and K. Cain, Children’s comprehension problems in oral and written language. (pp. 1-40). New York: Guilford Press.
Oakhill, J., Cain, K., & Bryant, P. E. (2003). The dissociation of word reading and text comprehension: Evidence from component skills. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 443-468.
Proctor, C., Carlo, M., August, D., & Snow, C. (2005) Native Spanish-speaking children in English: toward a model of comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 9, 246-156.
Ruddell, M. R. (1994). Vocabulary knowledge and comprehension: A comprehension process view of complex literacy relationships. In R. B. Ruddell, M. R. Ruddell, & H. Singer (Eds.), Theoretical models and processes of reading (pp. 414–447). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.
Scott, C. (2004). Syntactic contributions to literacy learning. In C.A., Stone, E.R. Silliman, B.J. Ehren, & K. Apel (Eds.). Handbook of language and literacy: Development and disorders (pp. 340-362). New York, NY: Gilford Press.
Shiotsu, T., & Weir, C.J. (2007). The relative significance of syntactic knowledge and vocabulary breadth in the prediction of reading comprehension test performance. Language Testing, 24, 99-128.
Snow, C. (2002). Reading for understanding: Toward an R & D program in reading comprehension. Arlington, VA: Rand Education.
Snow, C. E., & White, C. (2008). Word generation. Boston, Mass: Strategic Education Research Partnership.
Snow, C.E., Burns, M.S., & Griffin, P. (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Stanovich, K.E., & Cunningham, A.E. (1992). Studying the consequences of literacy within a literate society: The cognitive correlates of print exposure. Memory & Cognition, 20, 51-68.
Tabachnick, B. G., & Fidell, L. S. (2013). Using multivariate statistics (6th Edition). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Thorndike, R.L., (1973). Reading as reasoning: A study of mistakes in paragraph reading. Journal of Educational Psychology, 8, 323-332.
Torgesen, J.K., Wagner, R.K., Rashotte, C.A., Burgess, S., & Hecht, S. (1997). Contributions of phonological awareness and rapid automatic naming ability to the growth of word reading skills in second to fifth grade children. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1, 161-185.
Tunmer, W. E., & Hoover, W. (1992). Cognitive and linguistic factors in learning to read. In P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri & R. Treiman (Eds.), Reading Acquisition (pp. 175-214). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Tunmer, W.E., & Bowey, J.A. (1984). Metalinguistic awareness and reading acquisition. In W.E. Tunmer, C. Pratt, & M.L. Herriman (Eds.), Metalinguistic awareness in children (pp. 144-168). New York: Springer-Verlag.
Whipple, G. (Ed.). (1925). The twenty-fourth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education: Report of the National Committee on Reading. Bloomington, IL: Public School Publishing.
Willows, D. M., & Ryan, E. B. (1986). The development of grammatical sensitivity and its relationship to early reading achievement. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 253–266.
Downloads
Published
2017-07-27
How to Cite
Mokhtari, K., & Niederhauser, D. S. (2017). Vocabulary and syntactic knowledge factors in 5th grade students’ reading comprehension. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 5(2), 157–170. Retrieved from https://iejee.com/index.php/IEJEE/article/view/18
Issue
Section
Articles
