van Boekel et al 2017 Making the case for oral language

Chapter 4
Reading comprehension in the early years

Making the case for oral language
Martin Van Boekel, Panayiota Kendeou and Charles R. Fletcher

University of Minnesota
The relation between comprehension and reading comprehension is strong at all

ages and levels of proficiency. Even though there are reciprocal influences on one
another, comprehension remains a strong predictor for reading comprehension
performance across development. In this chapter, we will review current research
advances on comprehension development, with an emphasis in the early years,
specifically from preschool to early elementary school. We view comprehension as
a multidimensional construct that includes broader oral language skills. This view
has implications for the early diagnosis of comprehension difficulties, assessment
of comprehension, and instruction of comprehension skills in the early years.
Despite persistent efforts to improve reading performance across development (e.g.,

Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Schatschneider, & Mehta, 1998; Torgesen et al., 2001;
Vaughn, Linan-Thompson, & Hickman, 2003; Vellutino et al., 1996), the prevalence
of struggling readers in the early years of schooling remains high. For example, in
Copyright © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
the US approximately 31% of 4th graders read below a basic proficiency level (NAEP,
2015). Children who struggle with reading comprehension often exhibit a range of
difficulties, including problems with code-based processes that involve translating
the written code into meaningful language units, and/or language-based processes
that involve combining these units to construct a coherent mental representation
(McMaster, Espin, & van den Broek, 2014). Problems in code-based processes are
often identified soon after the child begins formal reading. In contrast, problems
in language-based processes are often identified only after the child has mastered
decoding skills (Catts, Adlof, Hogan, & Weismer, 2005; Chall, Jacobs, & Baldwin,
1990; Compton, Fuchs, Fuchs, Elleman, & Gilbert, 2008; Sweet & Snow, 2003).
In this chapter, first, we situate and discuss the nature of struggling readers’
difficulties in the context of the influential Simple View of Reading (SVR; Gough &
Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990). In this context, we advocate for a broader
conceptualization and measurement of the comprehension component in the SVR
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102 Martin Van Boekel, Panayiota Kendeou and Charles R. Fletcher
that draws on oral language skills. Second, we adopt a view of oral language skills as
a multidimensional construct that includes phonology, syntax, morphology, seman-
tics, discourse, and pragmatics. Third, we discuss the implications of this view for
the early diagnosis of comprehension difficulties, assessment of comprehension, and
instruction of comprehension skills in the early years, specifically from preschool
to early elementary. Finally, we discuss future directions for research in this area.
The simple view of reading
One of the most influential theoretical frameworks for guiding developmental work
in reading comprehension is the Simple View of Reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer,
1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990). In the SVR, reading comprehension is described as
the product of a reader’s word decoding (D) and linguistic comprehension skills
(C). Thus, a central tenet of the SVR model is that both code-related and lan-
guage-related skills are necessary for reading comprehension. It is this central tenet
that has guided a lot of the work in reading comprehension and has resulted in
great variability with respect to how each of these two sets of skills has been con-
ceptualized and measured.
The decoding factor in the SVR is what accounts for the ‘reading’ in ‘reading
comprehension’. It has often been conceptualized and measured by various code-re-
lated skills, such as phonological awareness, letter naming, phonological decoding,
orthographic processing, and print awareness. The linguistic comprehension factor
is what accounts for the ‘comprehension’ in ‘reading comprehension’. It has often
been conceptualized and measured by various lower-level language-related skills
such as syntax and vocabulary (receptive and expressive), and higher-level skills
such as listening comprehension (LARRC, Johanson, & Arthur, 2016).
Since its initial conceptualization, the SVR has received considerable empirical
support. Research has shown that it can account for up to 80% of the variance in
reading comprehension (Catts et al., 2005; Dreyer & Katz, 1992; Johnston & Kirby,
2006; Joshi & Aaron, 2000), and has been used successfully to diagnose readers with
predominant difficulties in decoding from those with predominant difficulties in
comprehension (Catts, Adlof, & Ellis-Weismer, 2006; Royer & Sinatra, 1994). This
work has also established the (partial) independence of the two components, de-
coding and comprehension (e.g., Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2000; Catts, Hogan, &
Fey, 2003; Kendeou, van den Broek, White, & Lynch, 2009; Kendeou, Savage, & van
den Broek, 2009; Nation & Snowling, 1998). As can be seen in Figure 1, considering
decoding and comprehension as orthogonal dimensions can result in the identi-
fication of four groups: a low comprehension-low decoding group (LCLD); a low
comprehension-high decoding group (LCHD); a high comprehension-low decoding
Chapter 4. Early comprehension 103
group (HCLD); and, a high comprehension-high decoding group (HCHD). The clas-
sification of students into these groups has been empirically established in different
languages (e.g., Florit & Cain, 2011; Kendeou, Papadopoulos, & Kotzapoulou, 2013).
The simple view has also been quite influential in providing a conceptual framework
for designing appropriate teaching practices that target both decoding and compre-
hension skills (e.g. Aaron, 1991; Kendeou et al. 2005; Kendeou, van den Broek, White,
& Lynch, 2007; McNamara & Kendeou, 2011; Oakhill, Cain, & Bryant, 2003).
Despite the overwhelming support for the SVR in the literature, it has also
resulted in inconsistent conceptualizations and measurement of the ‘comprehen-
sion’ component. In fact, in many instances the terms linguistic comprehension,
language comprehension, narrative comprehension, oral language, and listening
comprehension are used interchangeably to account for the comprehension com-
ponent of the SVR. Furthermore, because Hoover and Gough (1990) argued that a
measure for the comprehension component must assess the ability to understand
language parallel to that of reading comprehension, comprehension has often been
assessed exclusively by listening comprehension.
We propose that representing comprehension in the SVR by a more compre-
hensive language construct will provide increased precision in the instruction and
assessment of comprehension skills in the early years. Thus, our goal in the present
chapter is to situate the ‘comprehension’ component of the SVR in the context of a
comprehensive oral language construct. We hope that this conceptualization will
be deemed both educationally and psychometrically appropriate.
Oral language skills

Situating comprehension in the context of oral language may provide some new
insights into the specific components or dimensions that must be considered
in the context of comprehension assessment and instruction in the early years.
Specifically, a comprehensive view of oral language includes lower-level skills such
as phonology, syntax, and morphology, as well as higher-level skills such as seman-
tics, discourse, and pragmatics. We opted for this view rather than the common
four language domains of phonology, grammar (includes syntax and morphology),
semantics, and pragmatics (Hulme & Snowling, 2011), to provide more precision
in the dimensions of language skills that are relevant to reading comprehension.
Thus, a focus on these oral language skills may be particularly useful in identifying
potential sources of individual differences in children’s comprehension skills.
Before we go into more detail in each of these skills, another set of distinc-
tions that is important to make pertains to oral and written language, as well as
the receptive and productive uses of oral and written language. Specifically, both
reading and writing are considered aspects of written language, whereas listening
and speaking are considered aspects of oral language. Further, listening and reading
comprehension are receptive uses of language, whereas speaking and writing are
productive uses of language. The integration of listening, speaking, reading, and
writing is critically important. However, the complexity of these language processes
has given rise to the development of distinct lines of disciplinary inquiry in each.
With these important distinctions in mind, what follows is a description of the
separate oral language skills that are relevant to comprehension.
Phonology includes the sound-system of language. Children begin to acquire
the phonological system by developing phonological awareness, the ability to detect
and manipulate the sounds of language at the phoneme level. Aspects of phonolog-
ical awareness include rhyme, alliteration, blending, segmenting and manipulating
sounds. Phonological awareness develops to phonemic awareness, which includes
blending, segmenting, and manipulating words at the phoneme level. From pre-kin-
dergarten to early elementary school, phonological skills are critical for developing
code-based skills such as decoding (Perfetti, 2007), and are foundational for the
development of other oral language skills such as syntax and semantics (Hagtvet,
2003). Phonological skills have been strongly implicated as significant predictors of
reading development regardless the type of literacy instruction children receive or
of reading difficulties (Oakhill & Cain, 2012; Papadopoulos, Spanoudis, & Kendeou,
2009; Perfetti, Van Dyke, & Hart, 2001; Roth, Speece, & Cooper, 2002; Storch &
Whitehurst, 2002; Vellutino, Tunmer, Jaccard, & Chen, 2007).
Several methods have been developed and used to assess phonological aware-
ness. One set of assessments require children to synthesize and analyze the pho-
nemes of short words (Hagtvet, 2003). Specifically, phonemic synthesis requires
children to combine orally presented phonemes to derive a word, represented by a

picture that only the experimenter has access to; phonemic analysis requires chil-
dren to determine, and say out loud the phonemes making up the name of the
object on the card. Other assessments present children with a word orally, ask them
to delete a syllable, phoneme, or rime and say the new word out loud (Berninger,
Abbott, Nagy, & Carlisle, 2010). Another common measure is a non-word memory
test, which orally presents children with non-words increasing in phonological
complexity, asking them to repeat the non-word (Berninger et al., 2010; Tong,
Deacon, Kirby, Cain, & Parrila, 2011).
Morphology includes a set of rules about how the smallest meaningful units of
words, morphemes, are combined to form words. Children begin to acquire knowl-
edge about the structure of words by developing morphological awareness, the
ability to recognize, understand, and use meaningful word parts. There is evidence
supporting the importance of morphological awareness in the development of liter-
acy skills (Carlisle, 2010; Kieffer & Lesaux, 2008; Tong et al., 2011). Morphological
awareness also plays a key role in the development of decoding skills in the early
years (Berninger et al., 2010). Indeed, children begin to combine morphemes as
early as 2 to 3 years old (Carlisle, 2003; 2010). By the time children enter kindergar-
ten, morphological knowledge is predictive of listening comprehension (Potocki,
Ecalle, & Magnan, 2013), and at the beginning of grade one, children are able to use
morphological information to assist in spelling words (Wolter, Wood, & D’zatko,
2009). Children’s morphological skills continue to develop as the complexity of
words increases (Berninger et al., 2010; Deacon & Kirby, 2004), and become in-
creasingly important for the development of reading comprehension (Deacon &
Kirby, 2004; Tong et al., 2011).
Many different techniques have been used to assess morphological awareness.
One group of tasks requires participants to either determine or transform base
words by adding or removing suffixes (Berninger et al., 2010; Carlisle, 2003, 2010).
Other tasks require children to demonstrate their morphological knowledge within
the context of orally presented sentences. For example, children may be asked to
complete a sentence by selecting a word from a list of words that share the same base
word (Tong et al., 2011). Alternatively, the sentence analogy task (Nunes, Bryant,
& Bindman, 1997) presents children with four sentences that fit the form A:B::C:D,
where children need to add a suffix to the a base word, or change from present to
past tense in sentence D to make the sentence pairing C:D match that of A:B.
Syntax includes a set of rules that guide the order of words in a sentence and
define its hierarchical structure. Children begin to acquire knowledge about the
grammatical rules of language by developing syntactic awareness. The findings re-
lating syntactic skills to comprehension in children have been mixed (Cain, 2007).
For example, Potocki et al. (2013) and Kim (2015), observed that syntactic knowl-
edge was predictive of listening comprehension for children 5 to 6 years old, while
other researchers have not found evidence of such a relation (e.g., Vellutino et al.,
2007). Silva and Cain (2015) did not observe a significant relation between syntactic
awareness and listening comprehension in children 4 to 6 years old, but did see this
relation emerge with reading comprehension when it was measured one year later.
It has been argued that the importance of syntactic knowledge in language com-
prehension may be masked by the shared relation with other language components
such as vocabulary (Vellutino et al., 2007; Silva & Cain, 2015). Also, the relation
between syntactic and reading comprehension has not been consistently observed
(Cain, 2007; Oakhill & Cain, 2012).
It is also possible that the specific measures used to assess syntactic knowledge
may influence the outcome of studies assessing the relation between comprehension
and syntax (Cain, 2007; Vellutino et al., 2007; Silva & Cain, 2015). Grammatical
correction and word-order correction are two of the most widely used assessments
of syntactic awareness (Cain, 2007). Grammatical correction tasks orally present
children with sentences containing an error, which children must then identify and
correct. In word-order correction tasks, children are read a disordered sentence,
and are then asked to rearrange the sentence so that it makes sense. Similarly, syn-
tactic awareness tasks require children to make evaluations of grammatical sense
of sentences (Kim, 2015; Potocki et al., 2013; Vellutino et al., 2007), or correct
identified grammatical mistakes in orally presented sentences (Kim, 2015; Potocki
et al., 2013). Based on the descriptions of these tests of syntactic skills, it is apparent
that the tasks, while all focusing on some aspect of syntax knowledge, tap funda-
mentally different syntactic skills. The skills required to identify the meaning of a
sentence are likely different than those required to identify grammatical errors, and
even further removed from determining how to repair these errors. As these tasks
become more complex, their dependence on other skills (e.g., vocabulary, working
memory) increases dramatically. Thus, these task differences may explain some
of the differences in the observed relations between syntax and comprehension
(Cain, 2007).
Semantics1 includes, but is not limited to the vocabulary of a language. Children
develop both expressive and receptive vocabulary. Expressive vocabulary includes
the words a child actively uses when communicating, whereas receptive vocabulary
includes the words that a child understands. Expressive and receptive vocabulary
are distinct skills (Florit, Roch, & Levorato, 2014) and predict children’s listening
comprehension as early as kindergarten (Florit, Roch & Levorato, 2011, 2013; Florit
et al., 2014; Kim, 2015; Roth et al., 2002; Silva & Cain, 2015; Vellutino et al., 2007).
While several longitudinal studies have implicated the importance of vocabulary
skills in language comprehension, early vocabulary deficits are often masked by
phonological skills and, thus, only become apparent as language demands increase
in complexity (Hogan, Adolf, & Alonzo, 2014). As children get older and decoding
skills become more automatized, vocabulary becomes increasingly important in
reading comprehension (Storch & Whitehurst, 2002).
Receptive vocabulary is often measured using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary
Test-Revised (Dunn & Dunn, 1997), which orally presents children with a word and
then asks them to select the appropriate picture that corresponds to the meaning of
the word from a set of four. Expressive vocabulary, sometimes referred to as verbal
intelligence (Florit et al., 2011), is often measured using the vocabulary and similar-
ities subtests from the Verbal scale of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Preschool
and Primary School (Wechsler, 1967). These tests require children to define words
that gradually become more semantically complex, and decrease in frequency.
1. Semantics is not limited to vocabulary. In linguistics, semantics seeks to understand mean-

ing by constructing mathematical models of the principles that speakers use to define relations
between expressions in a natural language.
Pragmatics includes the understanding of the social use of language, in both

listening and reading comprehension. It concerns the relation of sentences to the
environment in which they occur (Limber, 1976). A more contemporary view of
pragmatics also explicitly includes the social and emotional dimensions of language
use (Cordier, Munro, Wilkes-Gillan, Speyer, & Pearce, 2014). The development of
pragmatic skills is related to language acquisition in several critical ways (Clark,
2014). Children acquire language competency through their interactions with
adults. These complex social interactions not only serve to provide children with
the vocabulary necessary for communication, but also provide the opportunity for
modeling proper language use and correct mistakes in a variety of contexts. Adams
(2002) outlines a detailed trajectory for the development of pragmatic skills, begin-
ning as early as 8–9 months with pre-verbal turn taking. Also, pragmatic skills are
predictive of reading comprehension for typically developing children but not for
their counterparts diagnosed with a high-functioning autism spectrum disorder
(Jacobs & Richdale, 2013).
Pragmatics is context-dependent, therefore, standardized assessments of prag-
matics may not yield reliable results (Adams, 2002). Adams provides a nice review
of various tests of pragmatics identifying the component skills that are assessed, and
the age appropriateness of these measures. Ultimately, Adams notes that measures
of pragmatics should vary by stage in development, with preschool children being
measured in naturalistic settings with a focus on social communications; older
children should be required to demonstrate mastery of pragmatic skills in both
formal and informal contexts. An example of such a naturalistic measure is the
Pragmatics Observational Measure (Cordier et al., 2014), which was developed to
measure pragmatic skills in children ages 5 to 11. Children are observed engaging
in peer-to-peer interactions during free play, while five pragmatic components

are assessed: introduction and responsiveness, non-verbal communication, so-
cial-emotional attunement, executive function, and negotiation.
Discourse includes the construction of meaning from oral communication.
Thus, discourse involves understanding oral communication structures. For ex-
ample, narratives typically have a beginning, middle and end, describe the main
characters, the setting, the goals, actions, and resolution (i.e., narrative schema). An
understanding of the narrative structure is essential in order to understand an oral
narrative. In turn, understanding of an oral narrative results in the construction of
a mental model of what the narrative is about. Mental models constructed using
orally presented narratives do not differ in content from those constructed using
written narratives, therefore overall oral narrative comprehension relies on the
same set of skills as reading narrative comprehension, only devoid of the reliance
on decoding skills (Hogan et al., 2014; Potocki et al., 2013; van den Broek, Kendeou,
& White, 2009). This is, perhaps the most important reason that discourse skills are
particularly relevant for reading comprehension.
Discourse depends on several sub-skills. One such skill is inference genera-

tion. Inference skills develop well before reading and transfer from non-reading to
reading contexts (Kendeou, Bohn-Gettler, White, & van den Broek, 2008; Kendeou,
van den Broek, Helder, & Karlsoon, 2014; Kendeou, 2015). Developing inference
skills is positively related to both listening (Hannon & Frias, 2012; Lepola, Lynch,
Laakkonen, Silven & Niemi, 2012) and reading comprehension skills (Oakhill &
Cain, 2012; Silva & Cain, 2015).
Discourse also depends on background knowledge. The influence of prior
knowledge on comprehension in well-established and can be traced back to the
work of Bartlett (1932), who demonstrated that individuals’ pre-existing expecta-
tions and experiences affected their memory for the events described in the text.
Further work on this issue demonstrated the effects of schemas (e.g., Rumelhart,
1980), conceptual structures representing information, and scripts (Schank &
Abelson, 1977), schemas for a temporally-ordered set of events, on comprehension.
These studies as a whole indicate that prior knowledge influences comprehension
by affecting both encoding and retrieval processes. Over the last 40 years, research
established that these prior knowledge influences on comprehension include both
facilitation and interference (for a recent review, see Kendeou & O’Brien, 2016).
Because discourse involves oral communication, measures used to assess dis-
course often use listening comprehension. Recently, Hogan et al. (2014) reviewed
several different listening comprehension measures, noting that these tests vary
largely on their reliance on linguistic and cognitive skills, including vocabulary, in-
ference generation, and prior knowledge. For example, tests such as the Woodcock
Reading Mastery Test-III (Woodcock, 2011) requires children to demonstrate their
understanding of orally presented text that increases in complexity from a single
sentence to paragraphs; the Listening Comprehension Test-2 requires children to

answer questions that pertain to vocabulary, main ideas, details, and reasoning
(Huisingh, Bowers, & Lo Giudice, 2006).
Oral language skills and reading comprehension
It is important to note that the distinct skills of oral language described above are
not independent of one another, but rather influence and are being influenced by
each other (Dickinson, McCabe, Anastasopoulos, Peisner-Feinberg, & Poe, 2003).
Some theorists argued that the dimensionality of oral language skills does not nec-
essarily follow the specific dimensions proposed, but rather larger constructs exist
that subsume more than one of these dimensions (Anthony, Davis, Williams, &
Anthony, 2014). For example, Tomplin, Zhang, Weiss, Catts, and Ellis-Weismer
(2004) proposed that grammar and vocabulary form a single factor, whereas
phonology is a distinct factor (see also Anthony et al.). Other researchers suggest
that syntax and morphology are also not distinguishable (Verhoeven & Van Leeuwe,
2008). It is also important to note that the predictive validity of each of these skills to
reading comprehension varies substantially. Specifically, even though there is strong
evidence that phonological skills (e.g., Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2001), vocabulary
(e.g., Anderson & Freebody, 1981), syntax (e.g., Scarborough, 2001), morphological
skills (e.g., Tong et al., 2011), and discourse (e.g., Kendeou et al., 2009) exert direct
influences in reading comprehension, the contribution of each varies depending
on the specific measures used, the age group of interest, and the language context.
A research synthesis produced by the National Early Literacy Panel (NELP,
2008) directly examined the extent to which oral language skills contribute to later
reading comprehension in young children. According to Lonigan and Shanahan
(2010), the synthesis showed that oral language explained approximately 10% of the
variance in later reading comprehension. Because the importance of oral language
in reading comprehension is well established (e.g., Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin,
1999; Dickinson et al., 2003; NICHD, 2005; Scarborough, 1990), these findings
raised questions as to whether the review adequately represented the extant litera-
ture. Lonigan and Shanahan highlighted that the majority of the studies reviewed
by the panel were correlational and measured oral language almost exclusively
using vocabulary; phonological awareness was considered a separate dimension
in the review, thus its effects on reading comprehension were not considered in
the context of the broader oral language construct. Furthermore, Shanahan and
Lonigan (2010) reported that oral language was more closely related to reading
comprehension when it was measured by complex or composite measures that
included various skills such as syntax, vocabulary, and listening comprehension
(as opposed to simple and single component measures of vocabulary, for example).
These findings led the panel to call for more research to understand the different
dimensions of oral language and its effects on reading comprehension.
The strongest evidence for the causal role of oral language skills in reading
achievement comes from training studies. One of the few studies that examined the
impact of a comprehensive oral language intervention (as opposed to interventions
utilizing single oral language skills), was a randomized controlled trial conducted
by Clarke, Snowling, Truelove, and Hulme (2010). Clarke et al. examined the ef-
fectiveness of three interventions designed to improve reading comprehension of
struggling readers who were identified as poor comprehenders, namely readers who
despite having intact decoding skills still struggled with reading comprehension
(i.e., HDLC in Figure 1). Clarke et al. designed a text-comprehension training,
an oral-language training, and training that combined text-comprehension and
oral-language. The intervention was administered three times per week, 30-min
each time, for a total of 20 weeks in 8–9 year olds. The oral language intervention
included training in vocabulary, spoken language, figurative language, and dis-

course (spoken narrative). Children’s vocabulary and reading comprehension were
assessed pre-intervention, mid-intervention, post-intervention, and at an 11-month
follow-up. The findings showed that all three intervention groups made significant
improvements in reading comprehension relative to the business-as-usual control
group, and these improvements were maintained at follow-up almost a year after
the completion of the intervention. Most important, the findings also showed that
the oral language group made greater gains than the other groups did between the
end of the intervention and follow-up.
The improvements observed in the oral language intervention group in the
Clarke et al. (2010) study highlight that the source of deficits in poor compre-
henders is not specific to reading, but extends to oral language as well. This con-
clusion is consistent with that of recent longitudinal studies, which have shown
that poor comprehenders identified in 2nd to 4th grade exhibit problems with
oral language comprehension skills even before the beginning of formal reading
instruction (Elwér, Keenan, Olson, Bryne & Samuelsson, 2013; Nation, Cocksey,
Taylor, & Bishop, 2010). This conclusion is also consistent with a recent study by
Spencer, Quinn, and Wagner (2014), where they tested the source of comprehen-
sion difficulties in a large sample of 425,000 children in Grades 1–3. Spencer et al.
not only provided strong evidence that poor comprehenders’ difficulties were due
to oral language deficits, but they also ruled out that these difficulties were specific
to reading.
The findings of the aforementioned studies suggest that oral language inter-
ventions that include various language skills have the potential to ameliorate poor
comprehenders’ reading comprehension difficulties, and if implemented early, to
prevent reading failure for many students. Thus, the study design and findings of the
Clarke et al. (2010) are in perfect sync with Shanahan and Lonigan’s (2010) call for
investigations focused more broadly on oral language. Taken together, these findings
suggest that a broader oral language construct to assess comprehension – especially
in the early years – is not only educationally appropriate, but also necessary to accu-
rately account for the potential influences on reading comprehension, as well as the
sources of reading comprehension failures in young readers (Spencer et al., 2014).
Instructional practices that enhance oral language skills
With the candidacy of oral language skills as both educationally and psychometri-
cally relevant for assessing comprehension established, an important question that
remains pertains to the ways oral language skills – themselves – can be enhanced.
The National Early Literacy Panel (NELP, 2008) review suggested three types of
interventions that can influence the development of oral language skills: (a) shared
reading interventions, (b) language enhancement interventions, and (c) parent and
home programs.
Shared reading interventions involve reading books to children with or without
reader-child interactions. One example of this type of intervention is the “dialogic
reading” intervention developed by Whitehurst and his colleagues (Zevenbergen
& Whitehurst, 2003). Dialogic reading trains adults to enhance children’s partic-
ipation during shared book reading by prompting children with questions and
connections to prior experiences, while at the same time responding to children’s
answers by repeating, expanding, and praising. The NELP (2008) review highlight-
ed moderate effect sizes of shared reading interventions on children’s oral language
skills independently of who did the reading (parent or teacher). These types of
interventions also varied with respect to whether they required high interactivity
between the reader and the child (as in dialogic reading) or no interactivity. The
analysis showed no significant differences in effect sizes produced by interactive and
non-interactive shared reading, suggesting that it is the frequency of shared reading
rather than its interactivity that actually contributes to oral language development.
Language enhancement interventions involve instructional approaches specif-
ically designed to enhance children’s language development. These interventions
may include vocabulary activities within daily routines, questioning activities us-
ing pictures, direct phonology or sentence structure training. One example of this
type of intervention is vocabulary instruction in whole-classroom settings (Coyne,
McCoach, & Kapp, 2007). The NELP review yielded moderate effect sizes of these
types of interventions on oral language skills. The review also highlighted that these
interventions were the most effective when they were implemented in preschool
(compared to kindergarten).
Parent home programs also yielded moderate effect sizes on children’s oral
language skills. These programs differed substantially with respect to their focus
but they all involved parents as the main agents of the intervention. One example of
this type of program is the Parent-Child Home program that aims to build school
readiness at home (Levenstein, Levenstein, Shiminski, & Stolzberg, 1998). In these
programs, parents are taught specific techniques to use with their children at home
in an effort to enhance their development. Areas of focus are not limited to oral
language skills, and include cognitive, behavior, and health skills.
In addition to the aforementioned three instructional practices that have been
highlighted in the NELP (2008) research synthesis, several newly developed interven-
tions targeting oral language have shown promise. For example, a group of research-
ers has undertaken a coordinated effort to develop targeted oral language-based
interventions for young children in the context of the Comprehension Tools for
Teachers (CTT) project (Connor et al., 2014). CCT includes several interventions
targeting oral language component skills from prekindergarten through fourth

grade. These component interventions include, for example, Morphological
Awareness Training (MAT) that aims to improve morphology skills by training
students on discovering rules and facts about affixes (Apel, Brimo, Diehm, &
Apel, 2013); Dialect Awareness instruction (DAWS) that aims to improve dialect
shifting in spoken language by training students to differentiate and use appro-
priately the morphological and syntactic structure of mainstream and nonmain-
stream American English (Thomas-Tate & Connor, 2013); and Comprehension
Monitoring and Providing Awareness of Story Structure (COMPASS) that aims to
improve narrative discourse skills by training students on comprehension moni-
toring and narrative story grammar (Connor et al., 2014). Related, another group
of researchers (Kendeou et al, 2016) currently works on developing TeLCI, a cloud-
based software application aimed at training inference-making skills in students
with comprehension difficulties. An important next step in the implementation of
these tools is to examine the potential additive benefits of combining some of these
targeted interventions in an effort to improve oral language skills in young children.
Thus, combining these tools may have the potential to develop comprehension skills
by drawing on each of these key oral language component skills.
Multi-tiered systems of support and oral language skills
Perhaps one of the biggest contributions of the SVR is that it proposes a balanced in-
struction in which decoding and comprehension are of equal importance and focus
(Hoover & Gough, 1990). With respect to decoding, there has been considerable
research on instruction and intervention programs for fostering code-related skills

(see Ehri, Nunes, Stahl, & Willows, 2001, for a review). Despite the growing recog-
nition that the development of these skills should be complemented by fostering
comprehension skills (e.g., Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony, 2000), the development
of comprehension instruction and intervention has not followed at the same rate. If
oral language skills are the answer to the comprehension component of the simple
view, as we argued throughout this chapter, oral language skill instruction and in-
tervention must be situated within current evidence-based instructional practices.
Current evidence-based instructional practices are designed and delivered in the
context of multi-tiered systems of support (Berkeley, Bender, Peaster, & Saunders,
2009; Christ, Riley-Tillman, & Chafouleas, 2009; Fuchs, Fuchs, & Compton, 2012;
Jenkins, Schiller, Blackorby, Thayer, & Tilly, 2013). Multi-tiered systems of support
have been developed in an effort to provide high quality instruction and differen-
tiated support for all young children. They consist of prevention-based models
that minimize the risk of failure by responding quickly and with evidence-based
approaches to meet student needs.
Within these systems, the emphasis is on a hierarchy of support that is differ-
entiated through data-based decision making. In this context, instruction increas-
ingly varies in intensity, frequency, and individualization at three levels or tiers (see
Figure 2). Tier 1 instruction includes high quality core instruction for all students in
the general education classroom. This tier is often termed the ‘prevention tier’ and
it typically addresses successfully the needs of approximately 80% of the students.
Tier 2 instruction includes targeted small-group interventions for those students
identified at risk. This tier addresses the needs of approximately 15% of the students.
Tier 3 instruction includes high intensity, individualized intervention and serves
approximately 5% of the students. At all tiers, teachers need instructional tools and
assessments that meet a wide range of student needs and are efficient to implement.
Furthermore, the hierarchy suggests that high quality Tier 1 instruction will reduce
the probability and need for Tier 2 targeted intervention, and similarly high quality
targeted Tier 2 intervention will also reduce the probability and need for Tier 3 indi-
vidualized high intensity intervention. Following this rationale, oral language skills
should be viewed as a key Tier 1 skill that will help build strong readers, and con-
sequently prevent reading difficulties (Dickinson, Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, 2010).
Having made the case for teaching oral language skills at Tier 1 in an effort
to develop and improve the ‘comprehension’ in ‘reading comprehension’ raises
questions about what specific skills such an instructional program needs to in-
clude and what form needs to take. To this end, the dimensions of oral language
may be particularly informative. Specifically, a comprehensive instructional pro-
gram of oral language must include focused, teacher-directed, and intention-
al instruction of phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, and

discourse in both expressive and receptive domains. The challenge will be to
design and deliver such an instructional program in the whole classroom, as
most existing oral language programs are either focused interventions or are
parent-home programs (NELP, 2008).
Important questions and future directions
So far, we have made the case that both decoding and comprehension are import-
ant for reading comprehension and should receive balanced instructional focus
and time in the early years. We also made the case that conceptualizing the com-
prehension component as a broad oral language construct, which includes both
lower- and higher-level language skills, may provide more precision in relation to
what skills need to be assessed to account for comprehension, as well as what skills
need to be taught to develop comprehension. We also situated the instruction of

oral language skills in the context of multi-tiered systems of support in an effort to
provide high quality instruction and differentiated support for all young children.
Several questions, however, remain. We conclude this chapter by identifying what
we believe to be some interesting future directions.
One question that warrants further exploration is whether there are particular
oral language skills that are more important than others for reading comprehension
in different languages. For example, it is well-established that languages differ in
the complexity of their orthographies (see Ziegler & Goswami, 2005 for a review).
These cross-linguistic differences have developmental implications for the role and
relative contribution of different skills on children’s reading comprehension, and
may raise questions of generalizability. One way to address this issue is by under-
taking cross-linguistic studies that will enable direct comparisons. Specifically, a
cross-linguistic, examination of the dimensionality of oral language and its contri-
bution to reading comprehension, will shed some light into the potential invariance
and predictive validity of the oral language construct across languages.
A second question that warrants further exploration is whether there are
aspects of comprehension that cannot be adequately captured by oral language
skills. Comprehension skills have often been defined as higher-level skills that in-
volve extracting meaning, generating inferences, and monitoring understanding.
Presumably, this aspect of comprehension can be accounted for by the discourse
dimension of oral language, as discourse includes the construction of meaning from
oral communication. There are also other higher-order aspects of comprehension,
however, that may not fall into the discourse category. One such aspect is the notion
of standards of coherence. Standards of coherence refer to a set of implicit or ex-
plicit criteria for comprehension (van den Broek, Bohn-Gettler, Kendeou, Carlson,
& White, 2011; van den Broek, Kendeou, & White, 2009; van den Broek, Lorch,
Linderholm, & Gustafson, 2001; van den Broek, Risden, & Husebye-Hartmann,
1995) . These criteria vary between individuals, as well as within an individual
from one comprehension situation to the next. These standards directly influence
the execution of passive and strategic processes that can take place during compre-
hension, and are also influenced by individual differences, text characteristics, and
task demands. Even though assessing standards of coherence is by itself an open
question in the field of text and discourse, a consideration of standards of coherence
in any accounts of comprehension seems appropriate.
A final issue pertains to the extent to which a conceptualization of comprehen-
sion as oral language skills adequately captures the role of background knowledge.
Said differently, where is background knowledge in oral language? In the context
of reading comprehension three forms of background knowledge are particularly
relevant: domain knowledge, topic knowledge, and general world knowledge

(Alexander & Murphy, 1998). Domain knowledge refers to knowledge in a spe-
cific domain, field, or area of study (e.g., psychology). Topic knowledge refers to
knowledge relevant to a specific discourse (e.g., text,). General world knowledge is
a broader level of knowledge that captures information assumed to be known by the
general population – this level of knowledge does change over time. Presumably,
background knowledge can be accounted for by the discourse dimension of oral
language, as we discussed earlier in this chapter. Even though no single prior knowl-
edge measure can adequately account for the background knowledge available to
a reader in a specific reading situation, various measures can at least account for
background knowledge that is relevant to a particular reading comprehension sit-
uation (Kendeou, McMaster, & Christ, 2016).
Although the aforementioned questions are by no means exhaustive, we be-
lieve that they can direct future research in comprehension in the early years. By
addressing these questions, we will gain a deeper understanding into the nature of
comprehension and the underlying processes and systems that support it.
Final note: Oral language instruction and the achievement gap
It has long been established that students from disadvantaged families begin for-
mal schooling with lower oral language skills than their counterparts from higher
income families. Research has shown that these children are exposed on average
to 30 million fewer words than their counterparts at the onset of formal schooling,
and their oral language skills continue to remain low in elementary and middle
school (Hart & Risley, 1995). More recent work established that this oral language
gap is present as early as 18 months old (Fernald, Marchman, & Weisleder, 2013).
This achievement gap has also been observed in other language related skills such
as letter identification as early as three years of age (Burchinal et al., 2011). While
current reading scores are significantly higher now for Black, Hispanic and White
students in the US when compared to older test scores, the reading achievement
gap continues to persist (Hemphill, Vanneman, & Rahman, 2011; Vannerman,
Hamilton, Baldwin Anderson, & Rahman, 2009). Thus, designing and delivering
Tier 1 oral language instructional programs in the context of multi-tiered systems of
support not only has the potential to develop oral language skills in young children,
but to also close the achievement gap in reading.
COMPREHENSION
Low Decoding – High Decoding –
High Comprehension High Comprehension
− DECODING +
Low Decoding – High Decoding –

Low Comprehension Low Comprehension
Figure 1. Simple view of reading based classifications
More specialized,
frequent, and intense
instruction
Tier 3
Individualized
Interventions
(5% of the population)
Tier 2
Small-Group
Targeted Interventions
Tier 1
Core Instruction
Figure 2. Illustration of the multi-tiered systems of support framework
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Chapter 4

Reading comprehension in the early years

Martin Van Boekel, Panayiota Kendeou and Charles R. Fletcher

The relation between comprehension and reading comprehension is strong at all

Despite persistent efforts to improve reading performance across development (e.g.,

The simple view of reading

Oral language skills

children to combine orally presented phonemes to derive a word, represented by a

1. Semantics is not limited to vocabulary. In linguistics, semantics seeks to understand mean-

Pragmatics includes the understanding of the social use of language, in both

in peer-to-peer interactions during free play, while five pragmatic components

Discourse depends on several sub-skills. One such skill is inference genera-

sentence to paragraphs; the Listening Comprehension Test-2 requires children to

Oral language skills and reading comprehension

included training in vocabulary, spoken language, figurative language, and dis-

Instructional practices that enhance oral language skills

targeting oral language component skills from prekindergarten through fourth

Multi-tiered systems of support and oral language skills

research on instruction and intervention programs for fostering code-related skills

al instruction of phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, and

Important questions and future directions

need to be taught to develop comprehension. We also situated the instruction of

relevant: domain knowledge, topic knowledge, and general world knowledge

Final note: Oral language instruction and the achievement gap

Low Decoding – High Decoding –

Figure 1. Simple view of reading based classifications

Figure 2. Illustration of the multi-tiered systems of support framework

1404–1420. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01620.x

dents: Comparing extended instruction to embedded instruction and incidental exposure.

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