Text comprehension strategy instruction with poor readers

The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of teaching text comprehension strategies to children with decoding and reading comprehension problems and with a poor or normal listening ability. Two experiments are reported. Four text comprehension strategies, viz., question generation, summarizing, clarification, and predicting were taught through direct instruction and reciprocal teaching. In both experiments, effects were measured according to a pretest - posttest - retention test - control group design. Dependent variables were experimenter-developed strategic reading and listening tests, and standardized reading and listening comprehension tests. In the first experiment the subjects were 9 to Ii-year-old poor readers from special schools for children with learning disabilities. In this experiment, the intervention program's texts and strategy instructions were presented in listening settings only. The subjects in the second experiment were 10-year-old children from regular elementary schools and 9 to 11-year-old children from special schools. They were also poor readers but their decoding performance was not as poor as in the subjects in experiment 1. In experiment 2, the intervention program involved text presentations in alternating reading and listening lessons. Although in general, normal listeners performed better on all comprehension tests than poor listeners, there were no differential program effects for the two listening levels. Clear effects of both programs were found on strategic reading and listening tests administered directly after the interventions. In the first experiment, maintenance test performance showed prolonged program benefits, whereas in the second experiment these maintenance effects were blurred by unexpected gains of the control groups of students, especially from regular schools. Finally, apart from some local successes, neither of the two experiments offered stable evidence of transfer of comprehension strategy training to standardized general listening and reading comprehension tests.