ASSESSING READING CHALLENGES: THE ROLE OF METALINGUISTIC SKILLS

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ASSESSING READING CHALLENGES THE ROLE OF
METALINGUISTIC SKILLS

• Lorain Szabo Wankoff, PhD, CCC-SLP
• LLSW_at_aol.com
• Queens College of the
• City University of New York

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ASSESSING READING CHALLENGES THE ROLE OF
METALINGUISTIC SKILLS

• What to assess?
• How to begin to instruct?

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Research in reading acquisition

• Language prerequisites M
• Emergent literacy skills E
• Developmental stages T
• Core reading skills A
• (e.g. Decoding, Comprehension, Fluency) L
• I S N K
• G I U L
• I L
• S S
• T
• I
• C

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Reading skill requires the mastery of at least
three core elements

• Decoding the printed word
• Comprehension of written language
• Fluency
• CURRENT RESEARCH SHOWS THAT THE CHILD WHO IS
  SUCCESSFUL AT LEARNING TO READ WILL HAVE
  DEVELOPED CERTAIN SPECIFIC ANALYTIC ABILITIES.

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PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS READING ABILITYMOST
HEAVILY RESEARCHED

• PREDICTOR OF READING SUCCESS
• EFFICACY OF TRAINING TO FACILITATE DECODING FOR
  STUDENTS WITH DYSLEXIA, SPEECH IMPAIRMENTS, ELL

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PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS

• Can the child perform
• Phoneme Deletion -What word is left is we remove
  the /k/ from car?
• Word to Word Matching - Do pen and pipe begin
  with the same sound?
• Blending What word would we have if we put
  these sounds together/s/ /a/ /t/ ?
• Sound Isolation What is the first sound in
  rose?
• Phoneme Segmentation What sounds do you hear in
  the word hot?
• Phoneme Counting How many sounds do you hear in
  the word cake?
• Deleted Phoneme- What sound do you hear in meat
  that is missing from eat?
• Odd Word Out- What word starts with a different
  sound? Bag, nine,beach,bike
• Sound to Sound Matching- Is there a /k/ in
  bike?

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RESEARCH INDICATES THAT

• METALEXICAL
• AND
• METASYNTACTIC SKILLS
• ARE ALSO PREDICTORS OF READING SUCCESS!

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WHILE DEFICITS IN PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS CAN
EXPLAIN DECODING CHALLENGES, THE PREDICTORS OF
READING ABILITY CHANGE WITH TIME

• Roth, Speece and Cooper (2002)
• While PA predicted word and pseudo-word reading
  in 1st and 2nd grade,
• Semantic abilities and print awareness were most
  predictive of 1st and 2nd grade reading
  comprehension.
• The two most important semantic skills were the
  ability to provide oral definitions and word
  retrieval.

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While classroom teachers sometimes require
students to practice formulating definitions,

• The importance of assessing this ability in
  students with reading challenges, and training
  this ability if it is weak is typically not an
  area of focus.
• Research has shown that decontextualized language
  skillls including the ability to provide word
  definitions are correlated strongly with reading
  comprehension.

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That the ability to provide formal definitions is
a function of metalinguistic skill and schooling
was demonstrated in a study by

• Benelli, et al. (2006) For 280 children (ages
  5-11) as well as 40 adults with differing levels
  of formal education, performance on a series of
  metalinguistic tasks could predict the formal
  quality of their definitions.

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Current research that examines the effectiveness
of teaching certain metalinguistic strategies
appears to have wide application to the classroom
teacher and SLP

• Nash and Snowling (2006) examined metasemantic
  awareness-how vocabulary acquisition in 7 and 8
  year olds impacts reading comprehension. Two
  different methods of teaching new words were
  utilized.
• Definitions were presented orally OR
• Target words were embedded in a written paragraph
  that was coupled with a semantic map that
  highlighted the relationship between te target
  word and other related words.
• While both experimental groups improved in
  measures taken immediately after the training, 3
  months later the second group went on to show
  significantly better expressive vocabulary
  knowledge and comprehension of text containing
  those words.
• This research highlights the value of teaching
  metalexical awareness with methods that emphasize
  concrete examples embedded within language
  contexts coupled with visual support.

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Larsen and Nipold (2007) examined the acquisition
of definitions and its relationship to reading.

• A dynamic assessment procedure was used that
  required 50 typically developing 6th graders to
  explain the meaning of 15 low frequency
  morphologically complex words. Various amounts of
  scaffolding were provided by the examiner.
  Student performance on the task revealed a great
  degree of variability that was positively
  correlated with their literacy levels. This
  implies that instruction must be dynamic and
  informed by the literacy level of the student.

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Metalexical Awareness

• Can the child
• Analyze a sentence into lexical units or words?
• Categorize a word according to its superordinate?
• Give examples of subordinate category members?
• Provide the definition for a word including
  superordinate information and specific
  differentiating features?
• Provide a synonym for a word?
• Provide an antonym for a word?
• Provide multiple meanings for homonyms or
  lexically ambiguous words?
• Identify the grammatical category for a word?

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Although metasyntactic awareness has been studied
less frequently than other metalinguistic skills,

• a number of studies have demonstrated the
  connection between metasyntactic judgments and
  the development of reading. In particular these
  studies have shown that grammatical judgments are
  a predictor of reading ability ability (Scholl
  Ryan, 1980 Bohannon, Warren-Leubecker, Hepler,
  1984) Pratt, Tunmer Bowey, 1984 Fowler, 1988)
  Bentin, Deutsch, Liberman, 1990 Dermont
  Gombert, 1996 Nation Snowling, 1998, 2000) and
  reading comprehension in particular (Cairns,
  Schlisselberg, Waltzman McDaniel, 2006).

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Metasyntactic Awareness

• Can the child
• Unscramble a jumbled sentence?
• Fill-in missing words in sentences or phrases?
• Determine if two sentences have the same or
  different meanings?
• Determine if a sentence is grammatical or not?
• Correct grammatical errors?
• Recognize or produce a paraphrase of a sentence?
• Recognize or detect a lexically or structurally
  ambiguous sentence i.e. determine if the sentence
  in question can have more than interpretation.

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Cairns, Waltzman, Schlisselberg (2004) found
ambiguity detection to be a significant predictor
of reading achievement for preschoolers one year
later.

• Ambiguity detection skill was related to 1st
  grade reading achievement and to second and third
  grade reading achievement.
• Detection of lexical ambiguities (e.g. The
  children saw the bat lying near the fence.)
  develops in first grade, correlates highly with
  reading readiness measures, and is a strong
  predictor of second grade reading ability
  indicating that it is a precursor of reading
  skill.
• Structural ambiguity detection(e.g.The girl
  tickled the baby with the teddy bear.) emerged
  in second grade and was a predictor of third
  grade reading ability.

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Beyond simply predicting reading ability, there
have been successful training studies in
ambiguity detection designed to facilitate
reading.

• Zipke (2006) recently demonstrated that training
  riddle comprehension and homonym and sentential
  ambiguity detection resulted in increases in
  reading comprehension scores.
• Pilot data reported by Wankoff Cairns (in
  press) described a youngster from a Hispanic home
  with reading comprehension challenges but good
  reading decoding whose reading comprehension
  scores improved markedly after ambiguity
  detection training.

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Reading skill requires the mastery of at least
three core elements

• Decoding the printed word
• Comprehension of written language
• Fluency
• CURRENT RESEARCH SHOWS THAT THE CHILD WHO IS
  SUCCESSFUL AT LEARNING TO READ WILL HAVE
  DEVELOPED CERTAIN SPECIFIC ANALYTIC ABILITIES.

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METALINGUISTIC SKILLS

• THIS REFLECTIVE CAPACITY IS NECESSARY NOT ONLY
  FOR THE MASTERY OF PHONOLOGICAL INFORMATION BUT
  FOR SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC COMPETENCE AS WELL.

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After a careful look at research in the areas of
language, emergent literacy, and metalinguistic
development, these reearched-based principles
must guide our assessments and intervention with
reading-impaired youngsters

• 1. Assessment procedures for reading must be
  designed to identify where on the developmental
  continuum the reader is functioning for word and
  passage decoding, reading fluency, and passage
  comprehension.
• 2. Our assessment procedures for reading and
  writing must include an assessment of receptive
  and expressive language.

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Principles (continued)

• 3. Assessments of youngsters with reading
  challenges must include information on literacy
  practices in the home.
• 4. While we are assessing or working with
  children with literacy challenges, counseling
  parents (who are literate) regarding the value of
  reading to their children, or exposing them to
  the value of print, and to literature that is not
  too difficult for them can be extremely valuable.

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Principles (continued)

• 5. For children with word decoding weaknesses,
  dynamic assessment procedures can be utilized to
  determine the efficacy of phonological awareness
  training to improve their decoding skill.
• (Ultimately, multisensory approaches to
  sound-letter correspondences e.g. Orton
  Gillingham or Lindamood Phonemic Sequencing have
  been found to be most effective for decoding
  deficits.)

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Principles (continued)

• 6. Children with reading challenges should be
  assessed for a broad range of metalinguistic
  skills.
• Children with reading comprehension weaknesses
  may have deficits in metalexical or metasyntactic
  skills. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that
  the extent of the childs metalinguisitc skills
  will determine and predict the degree of success
  he or she will have with literacy tasks.

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• 7. Dynamic assessment procedures must be
  implemented to determine whether explicit
  teaching strategies are warranted, and, if they
  are, what type
• (e.g. metaphonological, metalexical,
  metasyntactic)
• will be effective for the particular child in
  question.
• 8. Intense, explicit instruction in the area of
  need can reduce the liklihood of reading
  difficulties.

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Thus,

• Unlike oral language skills, reading skills must
  be explicitly taught even to typical learners.
  For children with reading challenges, research
  findings support the importance of repetition and
  exposure to learning strategies in the areas of
  need. Depending upon the individual childs
  profile, we might be facilitating emergent
  literacy skills, or instructing the child in
  metalinguistic skills at the sound, word, or
  sentence level rather than only addressing
  decoding, comprehension, or reading fluency.

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Contemporary research in reading and language has
broadened our view of the key factors that impact
reading success.

• Training in a deficient metalinguistic skill will
  ulitmately strengthen measures of reading ability.