Reading Comprehension IV. Reading Comprehension in Children at Risk of Reading Problems - Methodology, Results and Interpretation of Research
Abstract
This composite monograph is a collection of papers from a Reading Comprehension - a typical development and its risks - GACR project - which first focused on typically developing children. It presents an overview of the main project outputs of reading comprehension in the second phase of the project, which focused on at risk students of literacy problems.
Throughout the project, we applied the same theoretical framework - the simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), which defines reading comprehension as a product of two basic component skills decoding and lingusitic comprehension. The opening chapter of the monograph summarizes the most relevant findings about reading development regarding reading comprehension development in typically developing children, which we presented in a previous publication.
The research groups of "at risk" student and the design of the study is described within the chapter methodology. This chapter also informs about used measures including our own diagnostic instruments, which integrate both foreign and domestic approaches, and could be potentially used in evaluation of factors crucial for reading comprehension development.
Next three chapters are dealing with the structure of reading skills with an emphasis on reading comprehension in identifi ed clinical groups (students with dyslexia, students with SLI, and students with autism spectrum disorders). The "at risk groups" were at all times compared with the group of typical development children.
The second publication of the project also focused on an issue of group of poor readers and therefore one chapter of the monograph describes a group of readers with poor language comprehension (poor comprehenders). We investigated the possibility of use of the simple view of reading for identifi cation of individual differences in reading-related abilities within at risk research groups and across all research groups.
The results point out the fact that more important than diagnosis itself is to carefully monitor the level of reading related abilities. Individual differences revealed distinct profi les of reading problems.