Abstract
Child language researchers such as Cheryl Scott and Marilyn Nippold have documented students’ development of complex syntax during the school years (Nippold, 2016; Scott & Balthazar, 2013). If students are to comprehend what they read, they must develop mental representation of texts they are reading by deciphering meaning at the word, sentence, and text levels. Several levels of representation are necessary to construct meaning from written language: structural knowledge (i.e., syntactic and semantic knowledge), propositional knowledge (i.e., constructing idea-units), and world knowledge (i.e., knowledge of specific content; Kintsch, 1998). Considerable research has demonstrated the significance of semantic knowledge (one component of structural knowledge) to reading comprehension among elementary and adolescent students (e.g., Beck, Mckeown, & Kucan, 2002). Far less research has been conducted on the contributions of syntactic knowledge and syntactic awareness to reading comprehension. The purpose of the study by Brimo, Apel, and Fountain (2017) was to examine how syntactic knowledge and syntactic awareness contribute to adolescent students’ reading comprehension.
Brimo, Apel, and Fountain Reading Comprehension Study
Participants and Methods
Participants were 193 typically developing ninth- and tenth-grade students. A battery of assessments was administered to measure reading comprehension. In addition syntactic awareness and syntactic knowledge were assessed.
Reading comprehension was measured with the subtest from the Gates–MacGinitie Reading Test, Fourth Edition (MacGinitie, MacGinitie, Maria, & Dreyer, 2000). Students read passages and answered multiple-choice questions related to each passage. Some questions required recall of information stated in the text, whereas other questions required making inferences from the text.
Syntactic word-order task. Syntactic awareness was measured using a group administered, syntactic word-order correction task. Students had the items in writing on an easel booklet in addition to having the items presented orally via a prerecorded CD. For each item, students were presented with a series of words that were out of order. They were required to rearrange the words and write a grammatically correct sentence on their answer sheet, for example, children perfectly watching while the we were behaved them = The children behaved perfectly while we were watching them. OR While we were watching them, the children behaved perfectly.
Syntactic knowledge was measured by the listening comprehension subtest from the Group Reading Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation (GRADE; Williams, 2001). Students listened to 16 orally presented sentences and chose one of four pictures that best corresponded to the sentence presented. The syntactic knowledge and syntactic awareness tasks were composed of complex sentences with one independent clause and at least one dependent clause, noun phrase or verb phrase (Nippold, 1998), for example,
Sentence: Already late for his interview, Derrick was frustrated when he had to stop for a train. The correct picture shows a man in a car stopped in front of a moving train. Other pictures depict a man at an interview, a man getting on a train, and a man looking at a toy train/
Control variables. Vocabulary knowledge, word-level reading skills, and short-term memory have been shown to contribute to reading comprehension (Beck et al., 2002; Catts, Hogan, & Adolf, 2005; Cutting & Scarborough, 2006; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993). Thus, these areas were assessed to isolate the specific effects of syntactic awareness and syntactic knowledge on reading comprehension.
Results
Performance on the syntactic knowledge task was moderately correlated with vocabulary, syntactic awareness, and reading comprehension. Students’ syntactic knowledge directly accounted for significant variation in reading comprehension. Syntactic awareness indirectly accounted for significant variance in reading comprehension through syntactic knowledge. Syntactic awareness was significantly related to syntactic knowledge. Alone, syntactic awareness did not contribute to variation in reading comprehension. Because it did, however, contribute to syntactic knowledge, it indirectly contributed to reading comprehension.
Syntactic difficulties are a core feature in profiles of students with language impairments and these students are at risk for having long-lasting reading impairments (Catts, Bridges, Little, & Tomblin, 2008). If syntactic knowledge is a contributor to reading comprehension, then this area of language needs to be an ongoing area of treatment. Balthazar and Scott (2018) report on an intervention study to develop complex syntactic patterns that have the potential to influence reading comprehension.
Balthazar and Scott Treatment Study
The Study
Balthazar and Scott (2018) report the results of a complex sentence single-subject design treatment study for students with language impairment. Thirty students between the ages of 10 and 15 years participated. Students were engaged in treatment sessions of 40 to 60 min in length for 9 weeks. Half of the students were seen once a week and half were seen twice a week. The activities were presented in both oral and written form using computer-based applications (PowerPoint and Word) and paper-and-pencil tasks. The target sentence types included visual emphasis of key sentence features with boldface type, color, highlighting, and underlining. All complex sentences were composed of two clauses: a main clause and one subordinate clause. All items were read aloud by the clinician. Participants were told to visually track the sentence as it was read aloud.
Sentence examples included the following complex sentence types:
Adverbial clauses (ACs):
Right branching: Matthew couldn’t get his books because his locker was jammed shut.
Left branching: Although the Titanic was unsinkable, it went down in the North Atlantic on April 15, 1912.
Object complement clauses (OCs):
Finite: The Queen of Spain learned that Columbus had reached the New World.
Nonfinite: Jake volunteered to work the difficult math problem on the blackboard.
Relative clauses (RCs):
Subject, Subject: The candidate that wins the primary advances to the main election.
Subject, Object: The used car that Jake bought had major problems from the beginning.
Object, Subject: The legislature passed a law that reduced car emissions by half.
Object, Object: We met the new band director that the school district hired over the summer.
The sentences reflected both narrative and expository content. Narrative content centered on everyday life occurrences (e.g., John could not leave for the movies until his mother got home from work). Expository content was based on information adapted from upper elementary social studies and science textbooks (e.g., after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war on Japan).
Each session had three parts:
Part 1: Session began with a brief presentation of the structural characteristics of the targeted sentence type for that session. The clinicians presenting the lessons read from an instructional script that included a definition of the target clause, how it could be used, and ways to identify and differentiate it from other clause types. Students then listened to the clinician read a one- or two-paragraph selection containing multiple examples of the target sentence type to show how the complex sentence worked in context. Next, the clinician modeled five complex sentences for repetition for the purpose of priming production of the desired structural patterns.
Part 2: The second part of each session was devoted to explicit metalinguistic instruction and guided practice.
Sentence Identification. In five sentences, students identified the target subordinate clause after three to five examples provided by the clinician.
The second activity alternated between Sentence Deconstruction and Sentence Combining or Sentence Generation.
Sentence Deconstruction. Participants were shown a complex sentence and asked to isolate the subordinate clause from the main clause.
Sentence Combining. Participants were asked to combine two simple sentences into one complex sentence. Students were to use predetermined simple (one-clause) sentences to construct complex (two-clause) sentences that followed the target syntactic pattern.
Part 3: The third part of each session engaged the participant in one of several activities designed to highlight the meanings and/or purposes of the complex sentence in context. In all of these activities, the clinician provided scaffolding as needed.
Clause Hunt. The student and clinician read a passage aloud together. After each two or three sentences, the clinician prompted the student to identify target subordinate clauses, followed by discussion on how the clause added meaning, detail, or nuance to the sentence.
Preference Production. The student viewed sets of two complex sentences that were the same with the exception of one key word or phrase in the subordinate clause (e.g., Some soldiers who are leaving for duty in Iraq are having trouble finding a job versus Some soldiers who are returning from duty in Iraq are having trouble finding a job). The student was asked which one made more sense and why.
Cloze Production. The student and clinician read a passage aloud together. On a second copy of the same passage with blanks for subordinate clauses, the student participant was to provide a target clause that made sense.
Probes were administered at the end of the treatment activities within a designated session. The clinician read each item (two simple sentences) aloud while the participant read along silently. The participant then wrote his or her solution (combining the information from two simple sentences into one complex sentence) in the blank provided. Following are examples with a correct response in italics: The astronauts on Apollo 13 could not land on the moon. The spaceship malfunctioned. The astronauts on Apollo 13 could not land on the moon because the spaceship malfunctioned. (right-branching AC) The man spent the night in jail. The policeman arrested the man for disorderly conduct. The man who the policeman arrested for disorderly conduct spent the night in jail. (subject-object RC)
Results/Discussion
Benefits of the study were examined by analyzing scores on the probe sentences and comparing pre–post treatment scores on norm-referenced language tests and naturalistic writing samples. The majority of students demonstrated moderate or high learning effects on AC and RC sentences, but not on OC sentences. Compared with AC and RC, OC performance showed greater fluctuation across time and was also closer to ceiling at baseline, which could have limited the potential for contrast. There were large significant gains on the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals–Fourth Edition (CELF-4; Semel, Wiig, & Secord, 2003). There was less evidence of treatment effects on reading and writing scores. Although students exhibited gains on the Gray Oral Reading Tests–Fourth Edition (GORT-4; Wiederholt & Bryant, 2001), these gains were not significant. The researchers had hypothesized that scores on the GORT-4 would be affected by treatment because the GORT-4 passages contain complex sentences that must be correctly parsed to arrive at text-level meaning. Because the changes observed were consistently in a positive direction, it may be that either the quantity of treatment was not sufficient to produce significant gains or that the treatment content did not link directly enough to the task of reading.
Posttreatment narrative and expository writing samples did not show gains on measures frequently used to index sentence complexity (mean length of T-unit [MLTU] and subordination index [SI]—number of clauses, main and subordinate, divided by number of T-units). The lack of change on the writing measures is likely related to the relatively short intervention period and the emphasis on the sentence level. Students with language impairments typically exhibit marked writing difficulties (Scott & Windsor, 2000). There were no significant differences in any of language/literacy measures based on dosage. Students who received 18 intervention sessions in 9 weeks did no better than students who received nine intervention sessions in that time. This was somewhat surprising, yet other studies have found little relationship between dosage and degree of treatment response.
Although the results of this intervention did not result in significant changes in reading comprehension, the trends were in the right direction. There are several reasons why the results may not have been significant. It is possible that the intervention needed to be longer. Or perhaps, more likely, direct work on comprehension of the syntactic patterns was necessary. The study focused on recognition and production of a variety of complex syntactic patterns in individual sentences, not within extended discourse. No training was provided on comprehending these patterns in narrative and expository text. The Balthazar and Scott study represent an important first step—students must be able to recognize the structures if they are to comprehend them.