Top Lang Disorders Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 73–83 Important...

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Top Lang DisordersVol. 31, No. 1, pp. 73–83Copyright c© 2011 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

Important Constructs inLiteracy Learningacross Disciplines

Barbara R. Foorman, PhD; Elissa J. Arndt, PhD;Elizabeth C. Crawford, PhD

Currently students who struggle with language and literacy learning are classified with various la-

bels in different states—language learning disabilities, dyslexia, specific language impairment, and

specific learning disability—in spite of having similar diagnostic profiles. Drawing on the research

on comprehension of written language, we propose common language for teachers of language

and literacy to use in planning intervention. The common language is based on a common set

of constructs and measures rooted in research in linguistics and psychology and applied to edu-

cational science. The common constructs are knowledge of phonological structures, knowledge

of the alphabetic principle, fluency in decoding and encoding, comprehension of oral and writ-

ten language, and extensive reading and writing. The common language should facilitate commu-

nication between speech, language, and reading specialists in their efforts to address intraindi-

vidual differences in individual students with evidence-based diagnostic profiles that can inform

treatment. Key words: individual differences, language impairment, literacy learning, readingcomprehension, reading development, specific language disability, speech impairment, writtenlanguage comprehension

IN A “WAIT-TO-FAIL” WORLD where treat-

ment of language and/or reading problems

depended on qualifying for services by ob-

taining particular labels, distinctions between

specific language impairment, language learn-

ing disabilities (LLD), specific learning dis-

ability, and dyslexia were important tickets

to treatment. However, in a “response-to-

instruction” world, ideally students are pro-

vided differentiated instruction as soon as

they manifest learning difficulties. If this

ideal world is to materialize, speech–language

pathologists and reading specialists must col-

laborate to improve clinical thinking and ter-

minology for describing intraindividual differ-

Author Affiliation: Florida Center for ReadingResearch, Florida State University, Tallahassee.

Corresponding Author: Barbara R. Foorman, PhD,Florida Center for Reading Research, Florida State Uni-versity, 2010 Levy Ave, Ste 100, Tallahassee, FL 32310([email protected]).

DOI: 10.1097/TLD.0b013e31820a0b86

ences in individual students so that differenti-

ated interventions can be designed. We argue

for valid and reliable assessment of strengths

and weaknesses to derive evidence-based di-

agnostic profiles on which to base treatment.

We address this topic by (a) reviewing the

literature on important constructs in literacy

learning and their relevance to reading disabil-

ities, (b) illustrating how empirically-derived

profiles of students with reading and language

difficulties can reveal intraindividual differ-

ences and lead to differentiated treatment,

and (c) suggesting common language for iden-

tifying components interfering with language

and literacy learning to enhance collaboration

across disciplines.

LITERACY CONSTRUCTS AND THEIRBEHAVIORAL MANIFESTATIONS

Writing is the transcription of the spoken/

heard language, which varies in the formal-

ity of its registers. Reading entails the under-

standing of written language. Both writing/

Copyright © 2011 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited.

73


74 TOPICS IN LANGUAGE DISORDERS/JANUARY–MARCH 2011

reading and spoken/heard language can be de-

scribed at various levels of representation—

at the sublexical, lexical, sentence, and text

levels. Recently, Abbott, Berninger, and Fayol

(2010) investigated individual differences in

these multiple levels of language in a longitu-

dinal study in Grades 1–7. They found great

stability in individual differences in spelling

across the grades and a significant relation-

ship between spelling ability and text com-

position. Autoregressive effects at the word

level (spelling to spelling effects and word

reading to word reading effects) were greater

in magnitude than word-level relations across

domains (spelling to word reading effects

and word reading to spelling effects). Thus,

they confirmed longitudinally what other

researchers had reported cross-sectionally—

word reading and spelling are related but not

identical processes (e.g., Fayol, Zorman, &

Lete, 2009).

Learning to read

In learning to read, the beginner must

map orthographic units onto phonological

structures. The ease of this mapping de-

pends on the “grain size”of the units (Ziegler

& Goswami, 2005). In transparent orthogra-

phies such as Finnish, Italian, Spanish, Serbo-

Croatian, Greek, and German, the mapping

is one to one, and, indeed, Seymour, Aro,

and Erskine (2003) found that children learn-

ing to read in those languages learned to

read more easily than children learning to

read English. In English, consonants are some-

times silent (b in comb or w in sword) and

sometimes combine to form one sound (th,

sh, ch, gh, ph). Vowel teams are often in-

consistent: the team ee in the rime –eer,

as in sheer, is not hard to decode from

print. However, if we heard the rime pro-

nounced, we would not know whether to

spell it -eer, -ear, -ere as in here, or -ieras in pier. Well-structured reading programs

present English sound-spelling (phonic) pat-

terns from consistent to less consistent and

provide practice in decoding the patterns

taught in associated phonic readers and an-

thologies. Highly frequent words with irreg-

ular pronunciations (e.g., the, of) and words

needed to make stories more interesting (e.g.,

dinosaur) are sprinkled into the lessons and

taught holistically by the teacher. Not surpris-

ingly, classroom-reading programs vary widely

in the extent to which text selections con-

tain words with sound-spelling patterns that

have already been taught and practiced and

the percentage of words taught holistically

(Foorman, Francis, Davidson, Harm, & Grif-

fin, 2004; Hiebert, 2005). What is abundantly

clear from research (Evans & Carr, 1985;

Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Schatschneider, &

Mehta, 1998) and from consensus documents

(National Research Council, 1998; National In-

stitute of Child Health and Human Develop-

ment, 2000) is that explicit instruction in the

alphabetic principle of how letters map to

sounds in English is necessary to learn to de-

code and to prevent reading difficulties. How-

ever, mastery of the alphabetic principle must

be coupled with construction of meaning—at

the word, sentence, and text level—if com-

prehension is to occur (Rayner, Foorman,

Perfetti, Pesetsky, & Seidenberg, 2001).

Reading for understanding

As we contemplate constructs relevant to

reading for understanding, we will consider

two influential definitions of reading and

models of reading. In addition, we will con-

sider recent work on text complexity that in-

forms our thinking about comprehension.

Definitions of reading and readingcomprehension

According to the 2009 Framework for the

National Assessment of Educational Progress,

“Reading is an active and complex process

that involves understanding written text; de-

veloping and interpreting meaning; and us-

ing meaning as appropriate to type of text,

purpose, and situation” (National Assessment

Governing Board, 2009, p. 2). According to

the report of the RAND Reading Study Group

(2002), reading comprehension is “the pro-

cess of simultaneously extracting and con-

structing meaning through interaction and



Important Constructs in Literacy Learning 75

involvement with written language. It con-

sists of three elements: the reader, the

text, and the activity or purpose for read-

ing” (p. xiii). Reader abilities include skill

in word recognition, vocabulary and back-

ground knowledge, strategy use, inference-

making abilities, and motivation. Text features

consist of text structure, vocabulary, genre,

discourse, motivating features, print style, and

font. Activity or purpose for reading situates

reading in a sociocultural context such as

shared reading at home with family, required

reading in school, or reading for entertain-

ment. Both definitions capture the interac-

tions of reader, text, and purpose of reading.

Models of reading

Among the many models of reading, we

will draw upon a simple view (Gough &

Tunmer, 1986) and a more comprehensive

view (Perfetti, Landi, & Oakhill, 2005). A

model of reading that has served as a heuris-

tic for proximal causes of reading difficulties

is Gough and Tunmer’s (1986) simple view

that reading comprehension is the joint prod-

uct of decoding (D) and oral language com-

prehension (C). The simple view predicts that

students who have difficulty recognizing the

words of age-appropriate text and/or have dif-

ficulty understanding the language being read

will have difficulty understanding the text.

Tunmer himself (Tunmer & Greaney, 2010)

pointed out that the simple view:

. . .was never intended as a complete theory

of the cognitive processes involved in read-

ing. D and C can each be analyzed into com-

ponent processes (Kirby & Savage, 2008), and

the development of each is influenced directly

and indirectly by several other factors (e.g.,

Vellutino, Tunmer, Jaccard, & Chen, 2007, p. 232).”

A more comprehensive model of reading

comprehension by Perfetti, Landi, and Oakhill

(2005) is depicted in Figure 1. This model cap-

tures both the word identification processes

of phonological-orthographic mapping and

word meanings discussed earlier under learn-

ing to read as well as comprehension pro-

Figure 1. The components of reading compre-

hension from identifying words to comprehending

texts. Adapted with permission from “The Acquisi-

tion of Reading Comprehension Skill,”by C. A. Per-

fetti, N. Landi, and J. Oakhill, 2005, in M. J. Snowl-

ing & C. Hulme (Eds.), The Science of Reading: AHandbook (p. 229), New York: Blackwell. Copy-

right 2005 by Wiley-Blackwell.

cesses involving general and linguistic knowl-

edge. In this model oral-language comprehen-

sion and reading comprehension are strongly

related conceptually. And, indeed, there is

strong empirical support for this as well

(e.g., r = 0.90; Gernsbacher, 1990). The text

itself—the text base—consists of propositions

derived from words in clauses and sentences

(nouns and predicates and modifiers). Thus,

the literal meaning of the text-base is primar-

ily linguistic. However, to make the text co-

herent, readers must apply a series of infer-

ences and construct propositions based on

information extracted from the sentences. In

doing so, they build a mental model of the

text that represents the situation described

by the text (Kintsch & Rawson, 2005). It is

possible that these mental models represent




the text in a nonpropositional format, such as

spatial analogues or temporal sequences. In

fact, the spatial dimension is important to

readers’ sensitivity to story structure (Perfetti,

Landi, & Oakhill, 2005).

Text complexity

This emphasis on cohesion in the model

of Perfetti et al. (2005) stands in contrast to

notions of text complexity based on read-

ability formulae. Traditional readability for-

mulae such as Flesch–Kinkaid (as included

in software programs, such as Microsoft

Word) use surface features of word frequency

and sentence length to characterize text

difficulty. Newer natural language process-

ing approaches to text complexity, such as

Coh-Metrix, include linguistic, cognitive, and

discourse-level features (Graesser, McNamara,

Louwerse, & Zhiqiang, 2004). Linguistic char-

acteristics include features such as vocabulary

difficulty, lexical diversity (type/token), word

concreteness, number of anaphora, overlap-

ping text segments, and sentence and text

structure. In addition, the discourse features

of text coherence and cohesion are impor-

tant. Readers have less trouble reading a co-

hesive text such as “The streets were wet be-

cause it had rained” than a low cohesive text

such as “The streets were wet; It had rained”

(McNamara, 2001). Yet the readability of the

more cohesive text is higher than that of the

less cohesive text (0.8 vs. 0.0 on the Flesch-

Kincaid Grade). Thus, traditional readability

measures are not able to capture a construct

central to the comprehensibility of text—its

cohesiveness.

Reading difficulties

The model of Perfetti et al. (2005) is a

useful heuristic for discussing reading diffi-

culties because it separates problems stem-

ming from word representation from prob-

lems with comprehension processes. Words

may be poorly represented because of difficul-

ties with mapping orthography to phonology

and/or because of incomplete lexical informa-

tion with respect to the word’s meaning, mor-

phology, or syntax. The latter problem can be

assessed with receptive and expressive vocab-

ulary tests, as well as definitional and contex-

tual vocabulary tests. The mapping problem

is typically called poor decoding, poor word

identification, or poor word recognition, and

it is the hallmark of dyslexia. However, it is im-

portant to realize that the poor mapping could

be because of lack of letter names and sounds

knowledge and/or poor representation of the

phonological segments that correspond to the

letters.

Poor comprehension processes are most

likely because of a weak linguistic system

(i.e., weak phonology, syntax, or morphol-

ogy), poor inference making, lack of general

knowledge, or poor comprehension monitor-

ing. If a reader has a diminished linguistic

representation for words, sentences, and the

connections between sentences and has diffi-

culty making inferences about these linguis-

tic meanings, then the literal text represen-

tation will be poor. The reader cannot con-

struct an accurate situation model if the text-

base is impoverished. This is especially true

if the reader has limited world knowledge.

By teaching readers to monitor their under-

standing of the text, they can develop a stan-dard for coherence. That is, readers can be

taught that the text is supposed to make sense

and, if it does not, then they need to reread

and figure out whether comprehension break-

down is because of not understanding the

meaning of a word, a clause, a sentence, or

the connections among sentences, or to lack

of prerequisite background knowledge. The

causal relation between inference making and

reading comprehension may be partly medi-

ated by the reader’s standard for coherence

(Perfetti et al., 2005).

In sum, the behavioral manifestation of

reading difficulties may have varied causes. It

is important for clinicians to assess students’

component skills to base treatment on demon-

strable need. In the next section, we illustrate

profiles of students with language and literacy

learning difficulties and how these profiles are

essential to accurate diagnosis and remedia-

tion.




PROFILES OF STUDENTS WITH WRITTENLANGUAGE DIFFICULTIES

Federal special education law has umbrella

categories for learning disabilities and for

speech and language impairment. These cat-

egories are met based on eligibility criteria

that vary from state to state. Researchers

have added additional nuances indicative of

their perspectives on the modularity of lan-

guage that does not always align with Fed-

eral special education terminology. For ex-

ample, language learning disabilities (LLD)

is a term that originated with Wallach and

Butler (1984) that “. . .more clearly linked

language acquisition, development, and dis-

orders to learning and reading disabilities”

(p. v). Dyslexia has often been discussed as

a component of LLD, with the specific deficit

area being in phonology (see the International

Dyslexia Association, 2002), More recently,

however, researchers have empirically sepa-

rated dyslexia from LLD to emphasize that

poor comprehenders often have concurrent

deficits in language comprehension but nor-

mal abilities in phonological processing (see

Bishop & Snowling, 2004; Catts, Adlof, &

Weismer, 2006; Clarke, Snowling, Truelove, &

Hulme, 2010; Pennington & Bishop, 2009).

Specific language impairment is a term largely

used by researchers as a classification that

rules out other areas of deficit not limited

to the oral language system. Still other re-

searchers attribute language and literacy im-

pairments to domain-general processes af-

fecting attention and memory (e.g., Plaut,

McClelland, & Seidenberg, Patterson, 1996).

No matter what label is used for eligibil-

ity for special education services, the diag-

nostic utility of the label is only as good as

the extent to which the profile of strengths

and weaknesses lead to the label. Across dis-

ciplines, professionals need to talk in terms of

the strengths and weaknesses of such skill ar-

eas as comprehension and oral and written ex-

pression so that an intervention plan may be

created on the basis of need not label.

To aid in the discussion of student pro-

files and intervention, an illustration of the

processes involved in written language is de-

picted in Figure 2. As in the model of Perfetti

et al. (2005) in Figure 1, the model of Hook

and Haynes (2008) in Figure 2 captures the

word level and the comprehension level of

written language comprehension. Moreover,

their model provides additional context for

the clinician/teacher to consider. For exam-

ple, attention, executive function, and mem-

ory, as well as visual and oral motor abil-

ity, can influence either level and are im-

portant to consider when grouping students

for instruction and/or providing accommoda-

tions or modifications. In addition, Hook and

Haynes’ figure delineates processes related

to recognition versus production (e.g., word

identification vs. spelling; comprehension vs.

expression). Finally, other factors to consider

when evaluating students’ performance are

listed at the bottom of Figure 2. With respect

to the student, there are factors of intellectual

functioning, educational opportunity, back-

ground experiences, motivation and emotion,

English-as-a-second language status, and stage

of reading. With respect to the text, there are

features related to text difficulty such as genre

and structure.

Later, two composite case studies are pre-

sented to further explore how the Hook and

Haynes’ (2008) model may be used to help

clinicians and educators understand the rela-

tionship between oral and written language

difficulties within an individual.

Student profile 1

Sasha is a 10-year-old girl who lives at home

with her parents and her younger sister. She

enjoys dancing and playing soccer. Sasha is

currently in the fourth grade at school and re-

ceives special education services according to

her individualized education program, which

includes language therapy twice a week. She

is also seen for speech–language therapy at

the hospital once a week. Her report cards in-

dicate she is struggling in several of her sub-

ject areas.

Sasha presents with a moderate-to-severe

language learning disability with strengths on




Figure 2. Processes involved in written language. Adapted with permission from “Reading and Writing in

Child Language Disorders”by P. E. Hook & C. W. Haynes, 2008, In R. G. Schwartz (Ed.) Handbook of ChildLanguage Disorders (p. 425), New York: Psychology Press. Copyright 2008 by Psychology Press.

tasks with visual components and tasks with

a multiple-choice format. Previous evaluations

revealed weaknesses in working memory and

executive function as well as below aver-

age vocabulary. Table 1 shows that she accu-

rately decodes at the word level, but has dif-

ficulty reading connected text fluently. She

demonstrates weaknesses in (a) comprehen-

sion of oral and written information at the

paragraph level, (b) making inferences, (c)

understanding multiple meanings of words,

(d) language formulation, and (e) identifying

relationships between words. Sasha demon-

strates strengths in the mechanics of writing

(e.g., spelling, punctuation), but her ideas are

disorganized and lack cohesion. On the ba-

sis of Hook and Haynes’ (2008) model, Sasha

struggles with connecting the top part of the

model (i.e., word identification/spelling) with

the bottom part of the model (i.e., compre-

hension/expression). This difficulty is likely

because of weaknesses in working memory

and executive function, depicted on the left

side of the model, and fluency, which is rep-

resented as having a reciprocal relationship

between word identification and comprehen-

sion. Sasha’spoor vocabulary and lack of back-

ground negatively impact her ability to com-

prehend higher level text.

Considering Sasha’s strengths and weak-

nesses from the perspective of the Hook and

Haynes’ (2008) model, clinicians could iden-

tify key areas for intervention. The model sug-

gests that clinicians could work on semantic




Table 1. Sample student profiles to illustrate

common patterns of student performance

Percentile Rank(Compared to

Grade Level Peers)

Area Examined Sasha Jason

Receptive language 25 70

Expressive language 25 55

Listening 16 80

comprehension

Phonological 40 16

awareness

Letter sound 50 2

knowledge

Word reading 55 16

Oral reading fluency 2 1

Spelling 36 2

Written expression

Mechanics 40 2

Composition 16 50

Reading 25 32

comprehension

Note. Specific assessment measures are purposefully not

identified to keep focus on the oral and written language

components to be assessed rather than any one particular

measure.

connections by beginning with those that are

literal and direct and moving toward more

inferential and abstract relationships. In do-

ing so, clinicians need to target strategies

and select materials for the intervention that

are appropriate to her limited background

knowledge and working memory deficits. The

school and hospital service providers would

need to work in tandem to develop a com-

prehensive plan to meet the needs indicated

by her diagnostic profile and have ongoing

collaboration and communication to have a

seamless execution of the treatment plan.

Student profile 2

Jason is a 13-year-old sixth grader living at

home with his single mother. His mother is

invested in helping her son with his difficul-

ties, but she herself struggles with reading and

writing. Jason has reported feeling depressed

and discouraged by the fact that he is 13 years

old and in sixth grade. His mother is not able

to get him to do his homework at home and

often ends up fighting with Jason about his

failure to complete his homework. Jason is be-

ginning to have a weight issue because he eats

and watches television after school instead

of doing his homework or getting any exer-

cise. He has been retained twice and was re-

cently identified as having a learning disability.

Jason is receiving speech and language ser-

vices once a week and reading support

through the resource room twice a week,

as indicated on his individualized education

program.

Jason’s evaluation results, depicted in

Table 1, indicate that he has difficulty with

basic decoding and encoding, but he exhibits

average to above average oral comprehension

skills. His reading comprehension is nega-

tively impacted by his difficulty accessing the

text and by his significantly below average

reading fluency. Written composition is a

strength for Jason; however, he struggles with

the mechanics of writing. On the basis of

Hook and Haynes’ (2008) model, Jason strug-

gles with the word identification/spelling

portion of the model, but excels at compre-

hension/expression. His lack of automaticity

with basic decoding skills prevents him from

reading fluently and accessing his strong oral

language while reading for comprehension.

Some other factors negatively affecting Ja-

son’s reading and written expression include

educational opportunity and his emotional

distress surrounding his feelings of failure.

Because of Jason’s late identification and

missed educational opportunities, it is crucial

for the educators in his school to work col-

laboratively to create an intervention plan to

address his extensive needs. He is a classic

example of a student who “fell between the

cracks” in the educational system. Although

Jason’s educators realized he was struggling

and, therefore, retained him twice, they never

went back to discover the underlying cause

of his difficulty—that he was unable to de-

code or spell words accurately or fluently.

Consequently, he received the same type of




instruction year after year. In moving forward,

his intervention plan must include word iden-

tification and spelling to address his basic

phonological and orthographic weaknesses.

As his word decoding and spelling improve,

Jason will begin to experience success and

feel motivated and encouraged about himself

as a reader and writer.

As illustrated by these case studies, it is cru-

cial that a comprehensive intervention plan

based on empirically derived diagnostic pro-

files be designed to meet the instructional

needs of each student. We have embedded

our diagnostic profile and intervention plan

within Perfetti et al.’s (2005) model of read-

ing comprehension and Hook and Haynes’

(2008) depiction of the processes involved in

written language. For clinicians and educators

to collaborate successfully across disciplines

in delivery of language and literacy interven-

tions, they must have a common language

emanating from clearly articulated constructs,

measures, and interpretations of diagnostic

profiles.

COMMON LANGUAGE

To achieve a common language for pro-

fessionals concerned with helping students

with language and learning difficulties, such

as Sasha and Jason, we need to agree on

common explanatory constructs. To achieve

a common instructional approach, we need

(a) commonly labeled constructs, (b) agreed-

upon measures of the constructs, and (c) diag-

nostic profiles examined within the context of

available resources and other factors affecting

written language expression.

Common explanatory constructs forlanguage and literacy

From our review of the literature earlier,

we see consensus on the constructs underly-

ing language and literacy acquisition and delay

(Research Points, 2009):

• Knowledge of phonological structures

• Knowledge of the alphabetic principle

• Fluency in decoding and encoding

• Comprehension of oral and written

language

• Wide reading and writing

Previously we discussed the importance of

mapping orthographic units to phonological

units across writing systems and, in alphabetic

systems, the importance of mastering the con-

ventional and intentional relations between

letters and sounds. The hallmark of this mas-

tery is fluent decoding and encoding, allow-

ing attention and memory to be freed so that

comprehension of the author’s message can

be extracted and constructed. Finally, the cap-

stone of developing the knowledge and skills

to read and write successfully is the oppor-

tunity for extensive reading and writing—at

school, at home, in the community, and in the

workplace.

Agreed upon measures for commonlanguage and literacy constructs

Converging evidence from consensus doc-

uments allows us to map measures to the

constructs listed earlier (National Institute

of Child Health and Human Development,

2000; National Institute for Literacy, 2008; Na-

tional Research Council, 1998; Rayner et al.,

2001):

• Knowledge of phonological structures:

phonological awareness tasks.

• Knowledge of the alphabetic principle:

tests of letter names and sounds, letter-

word identification and word recognition

lists, and spelling in dictated lists and in

free writing.

• Fluency in decoding and encoding: letter

naming fluency, timed word lists, writing

fluency, and oral reading fluency.

• Comprehension of oral and written lan-

guage: vocabulary and listening and read-

ing comprehension tests

• Wide reading and writing: surveys of

reading time, type, and amount and writ-

ten compositions

The classic study attempting to quantify ex-

tensive reading was by Anderson, Wilson, and

Fielding (1988). Fifth graders were asked to

keep logs of the amount of time they spent

out of school on a wide range of activities,




including independent reading. Students’ oral

reading fluency was measured and their flu-

ency rate (i.e., words correct per minute) was

multiplied by the average number of minutes

of out-of-school reading they reported. The re-

sult revealed an association between the num-

ber of minutes read per day and the number

of words read per year that increased expo-

nentially, as follows: for 5 min of daily reading,

282,000 words per year; for 10 min of daily

reading, 622,000 words per year; for 15 min of

daily reading, 1,146,000 words; and for 20 min

of daily reading, 1,823,000 words. Thus, the

more students read, the more words to which

they were exposed.

This association between time spent read-

ing and exposure to reading vocabulary and

world knowledge is captured by Stanovich’s

(1986) notion of the Matthew Effect, after

a quote from the Book of Matthew in TheBible, often paraphrased as: “The rich get

richer and the poor get poorer.” A decade

later, Cunningham and Stanovich (1997) uti-

lized a norm-referenced measure of reading

comprehension to address the question of

the achievement benefits of extensive read-

ing. They gave author and magazine recogni-

tion tests to 11th graders whom they had fol-

lowed longitudinally since first grade. These

tests included lists of well-known authors of

best-selling books and titles of magazines pop-

ular with adolescents. Foils were present in

both tests to correct for guessing. They found

that reading ability in Grades 1, 3, and 5 was

associated with extensive reading in grade 11,

even after reading comprehension in grade 11

was partialed out, “indicating that the rapid

acquisition of reading ability might well help

develop the lifetime habit of reading, irrespec-

tive of the ultimate level of reading ability the

individual attains”(p. 934). However, as Snow,

Porche, Tabors, and Harris (2007) point out, a

successful start to literacy does not always en-

sure literacy success at later ages for all chil-

dren.

There is less agreement about how to

measure vocabulary and listening and read-

ing comprehension. It is common to con-

ceptualize vocabulary as expressive or recep-

tive and to measure its breadth (i.e., size)

and/or its depth (i.e., levels of knowledge).

Traditionally, receptive vocabulary tests such

as the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-IV(Dunn and Dunn, 2007) are found to corre-

late highly with standardized reading com-

prehension tests that utilize multiple choice

or cloze formats. Likewise, expressive vo-

cabulary tests are often found to correlate

with listening comprehension tests where an

adult reads a passage to a child and asks for

a retelling or answers to specific questions

(e.g., Carlisle & Rice, 2004). The 2009 Frame-

work for the National Assessment of Educa-

tional Progress (National Assessment Govern-

ing Board, 2009) conceptualizes vocabulary

as the multiple meanings of words in context

and reports out a separate score for vocabu-

lary from comprehension. This conceptualiza-

tion of vocabulary moves beyond breadth and

taps into a student’s depth of vocabulary. In

addition, National Assessment of Educational

Progress reading comprehension is reported

with separate subscales and grade-level stan-

dards for text type (i.e., literary and informa-

tional).

Recent advances

With advances in psychometric theory and

computer-adaptive testing, the more com-

plex models of written language comprehen-

sion, such as that of Perfetti et al. (2005),

depicted in Figure 1, and of Hook and

Haynes (2008), depicted in Figure 2, may

be realized in the coming years. For ex-

ample, computer-adaptive testing allows for

more accurate estimates of reading ability at

the extremes of the distribution and, there-

fore, more appropriate delivery of interven-

tion. Finally, as researchers study the com-

ponents and nuances of literacy constructs,

they will better understand effects on achieve-

ment gains of grouping students for instruc-

tion (e.g., Mehta, Foorman, Branum-Martin,

& Taylor, 2005) as well as the degree of sta-

bility of language learning profiles and the

unique pathways that learning may take (e.g.,

Silliman, 2010).




CONCLUSIONS

For students with language and learning dif-

ficulties, such as Sasha and Jason, these are

propitious times. Research on the benefits of

prevention and early intervention has led to

changes in procedures for identifying eligi-

bility for special education that allows funds

to be spent on intervention before receipt of

diagnostic labels and for response to that in-

tervention to determine subsequent instruc-

tional needs. As a result, the focus can be on

using students’ profiles of strengths and weak-

nesses on language and literacy tasks to de-

liver differentiated, evidence-based interven-

tions. In service of this focus, we have en-

deavored in this article to develop a common

language for teachers of language and literacy

to use. The common language is based on a

set of common constructs and measures ema-

nating from research rooted in linguistics and

psychology and applied to education science.

To explicate a model of written language com-

prehension, we have drawn from the work of

Perfetti et al. (2005) in which the linguistics

of word-level representation (phonological-

orthographic mapping and lexical access)

is coupled with the linguistic and psycho-

logical aspects of comprehension processes

(i.e., phonology, syntax, and morphology;

general knowledge). The key to this model

is the idea that a standard for coherence—

readers’ motivation to make sense of written

language—mediates their inference-making

and reading comprehension. To comple-

ment this formal model, we added Hook

and Haynes’s (2008) graphic of processes

involved in written language to facilitate

collaborative planning among teachers and

clinicians.

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