Purpose : When working with struggling readers in the Czech educational and counselling practice most of the attention is payed to the word-level reading skills and not much is known about the reading comprehension skills. Actually, it is expected that reading comprehension naturally evolves, once the adequate automaticity in decoding is established. But according to the Simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) besides decoding reading comprehension relies also on linguistic comprehension, especially as readers get more proficient. In order to investigate individual differences in reading comprehension profiles of fourth grade struggling readers, in comparison to typically developing readers we tested three groups of children with different status of impairment in phonological and broader language skills (Bishop & Snowling, 2004).
Method : Three groups of children (children with dyslexia DX, n=32; specific language impairment SLI, n=30 and autism spectrum disorder ASD, n=18 ) and a control group (typically developing readers TD, n=126) were assessed on two reading comprehension measures. Timed cloze test: Children read silently short expository and narrative passages and were asked to fill in missing words based on a multiple-choice task for each item. Oral reading comprehension test: Children read a short story and orally responded to comprehension questions. For a cloze format we counted correct rate and percentage correct scores, for a question-answering format we counted “literal question score” (information explicitly stated in the text) and “inference score” (information not explicitly stated in the text). Assessed component reading measures included word and nonword reading, listening comprehension, vocabulary, morphosyntactic awareness and rapid naming tests. Tests were administered in paper version and in a fixed order.
Results : Data analysis is still in progress. Expected results: in a control group, we expect balanced performance on both reading comprehension measures and across partial scores, in the case of struggling readers we expect unbalanced performance unique to each of the struggling readers´ group in relation to their language impairment profile and characteristics of the reading comprehension assessment (e.g. Keenan, Betjemann,& Oslon, 2008; Cain & Oakhill, 2006).