Erickson Educational Consulting, LLC
  • Home
  • Language & Literacy Resources - Requires Email Sign Up
  • About Bridget Erickson, MAESL, Language & Literacy Consultant
  • About Professional Development Programs
  • Staff Development & Training Services
  • Testimonials
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Subscribe & Register
  • Home
  • Language & Literacy Resources - Requires Email Sign Up
  • About Bridget Erickson, MAESL, Language & Literacy Consultant
  • About Professional Development Programs
  • Staff Development & Training Services
  • Testimonials
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Subscribe & Register
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART

6/2/2017 0 Comments

A Case for the Sentence in Reading Comprehension

Update: What does the research tell us about language & literacy?
Research Spotlight: Scott, Cheryl M. "A Case for the Sentence in Reading Comprehension." Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 40.2 (2009).

If a reader cannot derive meaning from individual sentences that make up a text, that is going to be a major obstacle in text-level comprehension.This statement seems so obvious that it is all the more puzzling that so little attention has been paid to sentence parsing as a component of reading comprehension. The word sentence does not even appear among the recommended domains of best practice instruction taken up by the National Reading Panel (2000) and popularized as the five topic headings of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. Nor are sentences discussed at all under the topic of text comprehension (Scott, p.184). 
Key Findings:

There is a connection between sentence comprehension and reading.
  • "Researchers who have followed children with language impairment (LI) longitudinally have shown that a sizeable number of these children have problems in reading in later school years (Scarborough, 2001), even when their word recognition skills are age appropriate (Catts, Adlof, Hogan, & Ellis-Weismer, 2005)” (Scott, p. 185)
  • “It is probably not coincidental that the time when reading comprehension problems become apparent is when sentences in school texts present challenges that are not encountered in more casual oral language” (Scott, p.185).
There are specific language features children with primary first language find difficult to comprehend (Scott, p.186)
  1. Inflectional morphology – verb tense, verb agreement
  2. Sentences with long distance dependencies (reflexive pronouns, object relative clauses, passive voice)
Sentences are complex and difficult.
  1. Sentences with more than 1 clause
  2. Noun phrase expansion
    1. Pre & post modifiers
    2. Relative clauses
  3. Sentence order
  4. Distance between crucial elements in the sentence

Erickson’s Big Takeaways:
 The goal would be for students to recognize sentence complexity when they see it in a particular content domain, to be able to deconstruct that complexity so that they can comprehend the sentence, and to be more fluent with complexity when they talk or write about the same content (Scott, p. 189).
 
If a reader cannot parse the types of complex sentences that are often encountered in academic texts, noamount of comprehension strategy instruction will help (Scott, p.189).

Click here for a free download of a teaching strategy that applies this research!
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Tweets by @lang_in_schools

    Categories

    All Introductory Post Language & Culture: Loaded Labels Language & Culture Of Schooling Language & The Powerful Mainstream Research

    Archives

    October 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016

    RSS Feed


Bridget Erickson or Erickson Educational Consulting has worked with the following organizations:

Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
email Bridget Erickson , President  of Erickson Educational Consulting, LLC
Erickson Educational Consulting, LLC
Subscribe now for full access to the EEC, LLC website to access free language and literacy resources.
Now scheduling PD and consulting services for districts and schools. Contact EEC, LLC