Comprehension and Inferencing Flashcards
Comprehension
- critical skills for participating in school
critical skills participating in life - oral and written language comprehension move in parallel
Underlying skills for oral and written comprehension:
- word form processing (decoding)
- word knowledge (vocabulary depth and breadth
= grammar knowledge - general world/content knowledge
- language processing skills
Literal Comprehension
- occurs at the surface level based on what is present in the text
- on the page or right there comprehension
Inferential Comprehension
- requires the reader to draw conclusions based on prior knowledge and available clues
- between the lines or think and search comprehension
Evaluative comprehension
- goes beyond the text to consider what the reader thinks/believes in response to the message
- big picture comprehension
Comprehending sentences
- word order
- agent first bias
- ionicity bias
word order
- who did what to whom
agent first bias
- strategy that says the first noun encountered is the doer in a sentence
ionicity bias
first clause happened first/is the foregrounded info
Comprehending sentences is hard for kids with DLD
- TD kids, not DLD, know enough about how sentences work to rely on word order cues to pick the correct sentence robustly
- TD kids, not DLD, pay attention to cues to switch from agent first interpretations to other interpretations when they hear -ed by the end
Comprehending sentences- morphology adds key info
- number agreement- how many
- tense/aspect- time and duration
- mood- must, should, may, shall
Comprehending Sentences- Quantifier Scope
- following directions/recipes
- how much/how often do you do this
- what does the counting word apply to?
interventions for local sentence comprehension
- some evidence that shape coding supports comprehension
- useful for SVO type sentences
- useful for sentences with conjunctions and pronouns
Inferential comprehension- passage level
- lexical (figuring out word meanings)
- cohesive (figuring out pronoun reference)
Comprehending passages-cohesion
- cohesive ties
- antecedent (thing before)
- definite/indefinite articles
- pronoun reference
inferential comprehension
- requires access to underlying skills (decoding, vocab, grammar)
- shifts intervention focus to passage level information
- develop ability to recognize and answer certain types of questions
- children initially externalize the inferencing process and then it becomes more automatic
Detecting Comprehension Problems in DLD
- comprehension difficulties are a core concern for DLD
- some sentence types are particularly hard to comprehend
- inferential comprehension requires use of many difficult ‘simpler’ language elements
Assessment tools- Underlying skills
- PPVT- single word receptive vocab
- GAPS- tests understanding of active and passive sentence types
- TROG-2- select pictures from field of 3 based on sentences
- Token Test- touch/move tokens in repsonse to prompts
Assessment Tools - Comprehension in Use
- OWLS- reading and listening subtests
- TILLS- reading/listening at sentence level, directions following, connected text
- TNL- comprehending connected text (stories)
- Story Champs- comprehending connected text (stories)
- DIBELS- comprehension of short passaged (progress monitoring/weekly assessment)
Progress Monitoring Challenges
- need to give the same type of tool repeatedly to show change over time
- Need to align the tool with your goal to measure the target
- comprehension tools rarely give good clues to error patterns
Assessing Comprehension during Class Activities
- understand how a child’s ability with basic skills in your task affects other activities
- differentiate between local/literal and inferential comprehension
- following up on specific types of inferencing- some will be harder than others
Target language processing skills
-phoneme encoding
- music training
- working memory interventions
- automatization
Target core language skills
- pre-teach vocabulary
- teach children to use morphological decomposition
- empower children to learn about words they dont know
- teach children to infer word meaning from context clues
EMBRACE- Support DLL w/ DLD
- computer based intervention
- pictures + read aloud in English
- Spanish support
- physical manipulation
Target core language skills- grammar
- exposure with corrective feedback
- present pictures and sentences, child hears sentence and picks, correct child when they pick the wrong choice and repeat, move from sentences and pictures interpretable with many cues to only 1 cue
- shape coding, meta taal
Target inferential comprehension
- practice
- think alouds
- multi-component intervention
- modify the environment
Demaris PRACTICE
- Week 1: read a story
- Week 2: repeat week 1 story
- Week 3: new story
- Week 4: repeat week 2 story
McClintock Focus on Think ALOUDS
- think aloud
- model think alouds with 1-3 stories
- have child practice think alouds
- add comprehension questions after each story
Dawes Multi- Component Intervention
- make learning goals explicit
- discourse level focus
- scripted questions embedded in text
- varied inferencing types targeted
- think alouds
- build content knowledge
- story grammar focus
- enhance attention via various cues
- repeated reading
Modify the Environment
-adapt information
- present information with visual cues
