Improving text comprehension strategies in reading and listening settings

Traditional intervention programs for children with decoding and reading comprehension problems often focus on remediation of the decoding ability. The goal of this study was to determine whether it is possible to teach these children text comprehension strategies. The subjects were fourth-grade students from elementary schools and 9- to 11-year-old students from special schools for learning disabled children. All the children were poor in decoding and reading comprehension, and they scored poorly or normally on a listening comprehension test. Four strategies, clarifying, questioning, summarizing, and predicting were trained through direct instruction and reciprocal teaching in reading and listening settings. The effects were measured by using a pretest posttest retention test control group design. The dependent variables were the ability to apply the four strategies, general reading and listening comprehension performance, and knowledge of reading strategies. Analyses of each variable indicated significant main effects for School Types (children from elementary schools perform better than children from special schools), Listening Levels (normal listeners perform better than poor listeners), and Time of Testing (there was a general progress from pretests through retention tests). Although there were no significant main effects for Groups (experimental and control groups had similar scores), significant program effects were indicated by significant Groups × Time of Testing interactions. However, these positive program effects were restricted to pretest-posttest comparisons and they apllied more to strategic variables than to general reading comprehension.