Factors associated with good comprehension: understanding grammar
Words are the building blocks of sentences, but knowledge of grammar is also important for accurate understanding. A sentence with a passive structure, for example 'The horse was chased by the donkey', cannot be understood by considering the word order alone. Similarly, embedded clause structures require an appreciation of the syntactic structure of the sentence to understand who did what to whom in 'The dragonfly that was resting on the lily pad was annoyed by the frog.'
Children with poor reading ability can misunderstand sentences with such complex structures. Some of these difficulties may arise because of their lack of familiarity with the particular syntactic structures. In addition, these sentences require good memory skills, since readers have to combine the meanings of the words and clauses. The role of memory in reading comprehension is discussed here.
Shankweiler, D. (1989) ‘How problems of comprehension are related to difficulties in decoding’, In D. Shankweiler and I. Y. Liberman. (eds.) Phonology and Reading Disability: Solving the Reading Puzzle, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 35–68.
Another aspect of grammar that is critical for comprehension is the category of cohesive devices, such as pronouns (e.g. she, they, it) and words acting as connectives (e.g. before, because, although). If their function is appreciated, these can also serve as signals to the reader. For example, a pronoun such as she signals that the reader must make a link to a character in the text:
'Ruby met up with Billy to walk to school. She was carrying her violin for a music lesson.'
Likewise, words such as conjunctions and prepositions are commonly used to signal the temporal and causal relations between events. In these two examples, the subordinate clause gives us more information about the event in the main clause:
'He played in the park, after he did his homework.' (tells us when he played) or
'She was late for school, because she missed the bus.' (tells us why she
was late).
Children with poor reading comprehension experience difficulties with pronoun resolution; that is, what or whom is being referred to. This happens particularly when children need to do additional processing to infer who is being referred to, such as when there is no clear gender cue:
'Mary passed the drink to Ruby, because she was kind'.
Yuill, N. and Oakhill, J. (1988) ‘Understanding of anaphoric relations in skilled and less skilled comprehenders’, British Journal of Psychology, 79, pp. 173–186.
Skilled adult readers readily use the information provided by a range of cohesive devices to aid their comprehension: they have better memory for statements linked by the appropriate cohesive devices and will make inferences when signalled to do so by causal conjunctions such asbecause. Although children use a range of these devices in everyday speech even before they start school, comprehension of these cohesive ties and accurate use of them in written and spoken narrative production are still developing into early adolescence. Therefore, it is important to teach children the importance of cohesive ties, practise them, and show how they signal links between clauses and sentences in a text, in order to support children’s comprehension.
Murray, J. D. (1997) ‘Connectives and narrative text: The role of continuity’, Memory and Cognition, 25, pp. 227–236.
Cain, K. and Nash, H. (2011) ‘The influence of connectives on young readers’ processing and comprehension of text’, Journal of Educational Psychology, 103, pp. 429–441.
Pyykkonen, P. and Jarvikivi, J. (2012) ‘Children and situation models of multiple events’, Developmental Psychology, 48, pp. 521–529.