Difficulties at text level refer to comprehension difficulties resulting from limited vocabulary knowledge, lack of fluency, lack of familiarity with the subject matter, difficulty of the text (readability), inadequate use of effective reading strategies, weak verbal reasoning,
109 problems with processing information, and problems in recalling information after reading (Westwood, 2008). Interestingly, there is no evidence that direction-of-reading or punctuation and spacing can cause much difficulty (Grabe 1991).
Since comprehension depends on the ability of the reader to integrate the meaning of words and sentences into a meaningful whole by constructing a mental model of the text, i.e. mental representation, also termed ‘situation model’, by drawing on his or her lexical and background knowledge, Oakhill, Cain and Elbro (2015) contend that children can experience three different forms of reading difficulties: 1. general poor comprehnsion, manifested as poor word reading and poor language comprehension; 2. specific word reading problems, i.e. dyslexia, manifested as poor word reading, but good language comprehension; 3. specific comprehension problems, manifested as good word reading, but poor language comprehension. It is obvious that problems with one component, i.e. word reading or language comprehension, may occur independently of problems with the other component, resulting in the pattern termed ‘double dissociation’ (Oakhill et al., 2015). Oakhill et al. (2015) term the three groups of readers experiencing these three problems as ‘generally poor readers’, ‘children with dyslexia’, and ‘poor comprehenders’. Generally poor readers can be the children who have experienced early language impairments, while poor comprehenders, i.e. children with specific reading comprehension problems, are usually not detected before the 3rd or 4th year of schooling, when a sudden drop of their reading abilities becomes apparent (Oakhill et al., 2015). Children with reading comprehension problems do not usually have problems remembering factual information from the text, but find it very difficult “to integrate information from different parts of the text” or “to integrate information in the text with their knowledge of the world,” and to predict what might happen in the story and how it might end (Oakhill et al., 2015, pp. 25-26).
110 Research has shown that in the early school years good and poor readers mainly differ in word decoding skills, while in the later years of schooling, it is reading comprehension that differentiates these two groups of readers (Oakhill et al., 2015). However, with beginning readers it is not always possible to distinguish between their word reading problems and comprehension problems, and in such cases the solution is to assess word reading separately and to check language comprehension by assessing their listening comprehension (Oakhill et al., 2015) in order to see if they can make inferences necessary for understanding the text. When reading, children are required to make local cohesion inferences, which link lexical items, and global coherence inferences, which connect parts of the text and assist in making a mental model of the text. However, some studies demonstrated that “young children have the potential to make a range of inferences, but they do not always do so, even when prompted by explicit questions” (Oakhill et al., 2015, p. 43). Three factors influence children’s inference making ability: 1. memory; 2. knowledge; 3. personal standard for coherence. Due to poor memory, lack of knowledge and low standard of cohenrence, children may experience difficulties in inference making, resulting in poor text comprehension (Oakhill et al., 2015). If a child has poor memory, he or she cannot make enough necessary inferences because he or she cannot remember many details on which inferencing depends, like explicit information in the text. Moreover, if a child possesses limited knowledge of vocabulary or of the world related to the topic of the text, a child will experience difficulties in making necessary inferences. Lack of word and world knowledge may result in comprehension difficulties especially when children are faced with ambiguous words, i.e. the words that have more than one, often unrelated, meaning, and when the intended meaning of such a word must be worked out from the context and from the meanings of other words in the text. In such cases, “[t]he resolution of ambiguous words provides a good example of the interactive nature of text comprehension: the reader’s current mental model can provide the context for
111 the interpretation of such words, and that is what would typically happen in normal skilled reading” (Oakhill et al., 2015, p. 56). It is clear that depth of vocabulary knowledge, including relations and associations between words, is critical for reading comprehension and closely related to it, or as Oakhill et al. (2015) put it, “it is less beneficial to comprehension to know lots of words at more superficial levels” than to have “a relatively deep understanding of words” (pp. 57-58). The importance of vocabulary knowledge to reading comprehension increases between the ages 7 and 10 as children become better decoders and the reading texts children have to read become more challenging (Oakhill et al., 2015). Vocabulary difficulties and reading comprehension can be interrelated in a way that poor comprehension limits the growth of vocabulary, while further reasons of reading comprehension difficulties may be related to vocabulary knowledge beyong single words, like fixed expressions, common sayings, or idioms whose meaning, literal or figurative, depends on the context, where inference skills become crucial for inferring the intended meanings from the context.
Skilled and less skilled reading may result from differences in inference making ability, which is regarded as “a central component of skilled reading” (Cain et al., 2001, p. 850). Cain et al. (2001) maintain that inference failure of poor comprehenders may be the result of their difficulty to select the relevant information for inference making and of their failure to remember the information necessary for making inferences. Apart from vocabulary knowledge, syntactic skills of beginning readers may be the cause of reading comprehension difficulties, as “the syntactic demands of written texts continue to increase” during the school years (Oakhill et al., 2015, p. 70). Research has indicated that children with reading comprehension difficulties sometimes have poor syntactic knowledge, resulting from “problems [with] processing information in verbal working memory” (Oakhill et al., 2015, p. 71). While successful readers manage to integrate successive clauses and sentences in a text owing to their linguistic knowledge of anaphors, where pronouns and verb phrase ellipses
112 taking their meaning from another part of the text, i.e. their anticedents, as well as other devices for achieving lexical cohesion, and connectives, i.e. words and phrases signalling the logical relations between clauses and sentences, chldren with reading comprehension difficulties find it difficult to identify the correct anticedent of a pronoun, or to understand the relations expressed by connectives (Oakhill et al., 2015). The main reasons may be the use of superficial cues for pronoun interpretation, or poor working memory that does not foster creation of the mental model of text information. Moreover, studies suggest that poor comprehenders are not fully aware of the functions of connectives or of their meanings (Oakhill et al., 2015). Some children (poor readers) experience reading difficulties because they cannot adjust their standard for coherence to the purpose of reading a particular text, i.e. reading to learn versus reading for pleasure, failing to put enough effort into reading certain texts (Oakhill et al., 2015). The text structure plays a significant role in determining reading comprehension: although children are usually familiar with typical structure of fictional narratives, poor comprehenders “appear to be less knowledgeable about how narratives work” (Oakhill et al., 2015, p. 90). Children with reading comprehension difficulties find it difficult to distinguish between statements that refer to settings, characters and the purpose of the story, a possible reason being problems with memory (Oakhill et al., 2015).
Children’s ability to monitor their comprehension and conclude if the text makes sense is a strategic competence needed for detecting misinterpretation or failure in comprehension. When reading a text and seeing it does not make sense, skilled readers “can engage in remedial action to insure good comprehension [by] looking up an unknown word in a dictionary, re-reading a section of a text that does not make sense, and even generating an inference to enable integration between two propositions” (Oakhill et al., 2015, p. 95). A child’s ability to monitor their own comprehension is manifested in her or his ability to differentiate between the texts that are coherent and those that are not, and in the ability to
113 identify the part of the text that does not make sense. Studies have shown children’s early monitoring abilities, even at the age of 5, but “young children and children with reading difficulties, particularly those with specific reading comprehension problems, often fail to monitor their comprehension adequately” (Oakhill et al., 2015, p. 98) mostly due to memory limitations, lack of familiarity with the topic, and failure to set the task goal (Oakhill et al., 2015, p. 101).
Reading problems in English as L2 may be the result of too large demands placed on individual learners who may be struggling to develop their literacy skills in their L1 at the same time when they are learning to read in English. Weak word recognition skills inevitably result in comprehension difficulties, but adequate word reading and fluency can also result in difficulties related to understanding: about 10 per cent to 15 per cent of learners are reported to have comprehension difficulties when reading expository texts (Westwood, 2008). Comprehension requires “an active thinking process through which a reader intentionally constructs meaning to form a deeper understanding of concepts and information presented in a text” by interpreting new information and linking it to prior knowledge (Westwood, 2008, p. 31). Reading comprehension can function on three levels: literal comprehension is the basic level at which the reader understands factual information; inferential level of understanding involves inferring details that are not explicitly stated in the text; critical level of comprehension takes place when the reader evaluates the text and the writer’s ideas, compares and contrasts the information (Westwood, 2008). Weak readers “have enormous difficulty progressing beyond a literal level of comprehension because most of their cognitive effort is taken up in unlocking the print” (Westwood, 2008, p. 32). While good comprehenders and effective readers use a number of cognitive skills as they read (visualising scenes, actions and characters in a narrative text, reflecting critically, questioning, monitoring understanding, evaluating, predicting, inferring, and summarising),
114 poor comprehenders and ineffective readers do not interact cognitively with the information, do not think deeply, do not check or monitor understanding, do not read critically, or use effective strategies to aid comprehension (Westwood, 2008).
Drawing on recent research, Westwood (2008) argues that limited vocabulary knowledge, i.e. inadequate level of spoken language competence, results in comprehension problems due to a serious mismatch between a learner’s knowledge of word meanings and the vocabulary used in texts; also, the rate of reading, either too slow or too fast, can cause poor comprehension: the former may restrict cognitive capacity to lower-level processes, while the latter may result in overlooking important details. Also, lack of prior knowledge of the text causes reading without understanding, and if the text is too difficult (at ‘frustration level’), with complex language in terms of vocabulary, concepts, grammar structures or sentence length, comprehension is impaired. Moreover, inadequate use of effective reading strategies in text interpretation and lack of ability to make relevant connections among text facts (weak verbal activity) cause comprehension difficulties. Finally, reader’s inability to keep relevant information within working memory (limited working memory) and make connections between ideas is often related to slow reading (abnormally slow rate of processing), and the inability to retrieve information from long-term memory, are all causes of poor comprehension.
Grabe (1991) claims that these difficulties are likely to be caused by linguistic differences between L1 and L2 at syntactic and discourse levels: the need to focus on function words for getting more syntactic information; the need to organize information differently at discourse level; differences in the social context of using literacy; differences in the level of reading in L1; differences in evaluating the reading material, regarding it as truth and knowledge to be memorized, and not questioning the content. These reasons may potentially cause reading comprehension difficulties at the level of higher-order processes.
115 As Cameron (2008) points out, the differences between L1 and L2 in graphophonemic relationships, spelling patterns, meanings of morphemes, word order, punctuation, grammar structures, and organisation and structure of texts, which appear at different levels of knowledge and skills, i.e. the levels of sounds-letters, morphemes and syllables, words, sentences, text and the world, require L2 readers “to develop new skills and knowledge, in addition to what can be transferred” (pp. 135-136). Moreover, since languages differ in their structure, “the different structures offer users different cues to meaning,” so that looking for the clues that the reader already knows from his or her L1 may be ineffective and result in comprehension difficulties (Cameron, 2008, pp. 134, 136). To be able to understand a text in L2, the beginning reader needs to be aware of these differences and to develop new knowledge, skills and strategies that will aid her or his comprehension. The absence of appropriate knowledge, skills and strategies, will cause comprehension problems.
In her recent research, Griva (2014) studied reading difficulties awareness in EFL and in Greek as L1 (GL1) of fifth and sixth graders, and found that “students reported more reading difficulties in EFL (M = 2.29, SD = 0.47) than in GL1 (M = 2.46, SD = 0.32)” (p. 242). Moreover, statistically significant gender differences were found between the mean scores of comprehension tasks only in English as L2, while in GL1 there was no significant difference in the perceived reading difficulties between boys and girls. In English as L2, “girls showed to have a mean easiness [while] boys were aware of having more reading difficulties than girls in EFL” (Griva, 2014, p. 243). Boys and less-skilled readers showed awareness of more reading difficulties, which correlated with their reading comprehension scores. The difficulties included reading rate, fluency, understanding the unknown words from the context, and finding key ideas in texts both in GL1 and EFL (Griva, 2014).
Cameron (2008) stresses the fact that recent empirical research has offered evidence that fluent readers do process every letter, but they do it very quickly, and also “have
116 available the skill to speak the words of the text to themselves, the ‘voice in the head’” which they use for difficult texts (p. 125). When reading a text, fluent readers use visual information (letters), phonological, semantic and syntactic (related to words, clauses and sentences), and discourse information for text comprehension (Cameron, 2008). To be able to understand a text, a child has to “master techniques for using all the information available in a text” (Cameron, 2008, p. 134), i.e. he or she should be able to use four cueing systems strategically in order to construct meaning: visual cues (graphophonic), syntactic cues (knowledge of grammatical structures), semantic cues (knowledge of word/phrase meaning) and pragmatic cues (text structure and purposes for reading) (Active young readers, 2012). Visual information does not relate to illustrations or pictures accompanying the text (they represent semantic cues and contribute to meaning), but to graphophonic knowledge, which is based on the reader’s phonological awareness, and is used when the reader applies this knowledge to letter-sound correspondences to understand visual cues; syntactic information refers to the structure of language, i.e. standard English grammar, and to information such as clause and sentence structure, punctuation, function of words, word endings, and word order, used by the reader to understand syntactic cues; semantic information involves meaning conveyed through words, ideas, pictures and illustrations, and the reader uses his prior knowledge to understand semantic cues; context or pragmatic information refers to the readers understanding of the text structure and requires the reader to use his prior knowledge of text types and discourse structures to predict meaning and to understand pragmatic cues (Active Young Readers, 2012). Smith (2004) argues that skilled readers need less visual information if they are able to use the other three sources of information, thus relying on redundancy, i.e. the information they do not need because they already have it. Moreover, skilled readers are able to use their own background knowledge and knowledge of the world, often referred to as
117 schemata (Smith, 2004), and also their literacy knowledge of discourse organisation, necessary for finding important information in the text (Cameron, 2008).
On the contrary, being inexperienced readers, children do not possess knowledge related to a variety of text organisation and may find understanding different text/discourse structures difficult. Also, children’s experience with oral language does not prepare them for understanding the organisation of paragraphs as discourse unites, nor does it give them the skills of analysing topic sentences. What is more, the first texts children read are too short to be organised in paragraphs, so that they can learn about paragraphs and discourse organisation once they start reading longer texts. In respect to certain grammatical structures that children learn in written texts, rather than in spoken language, it is often the case that such new grammar patterns may appear confusing and problematic for children. Cameron (2008) argues that “without the support that comes from recognising the syntactic patterns, early readers have to work on each word as a separate unit, working out what it is and storing it in memory while the next word is tackled,” which can be inefficient as “memory spans are limited, and words can drop out of short term memory before the child gets to the end of the sentence and has a chance to work out the meaning of the whole” (p. 130). Consequently, beginning readers’ inability to integrate text information from different levels, and their inadequate experience with different types of discourse, may result in comprehension difficulties at text level.
Comprehension is the goal and essence of reading, which means that without deeper understanding it is purposeless. Taberski (2011) argues that “[c]omprehension isn’t a pillar at all − it’s the overarching pediment, supported atop the pillars” and leading “to the pinnacle − understanding what we read” (p. 49). To play such an important role, comprehension must be enhanced and supported by reading accuracy and fluency, the reader’s background knowledge, his or her oral language and vocabulary, his or her reading strategies and his or
118 her understanding of the connection between reading and writing. Rasinski (2004a, 2004b, 2013b) suggests that the most prevalent reason of reading comprehension difficulty is reading fluency, or more precisely, the lack of proficiency in reading fluency. Reading fluency “refers to accurate and automatic decoding of the words in the text, along with expressive interpretation of the text, to achieve optimal comprehension” (Rasinski, 2004a, p. 2). To be able to read fluently, readers not only have to decode the words accurately and effortlessly, but also to read with appropriate phrasing and expression: emphasizing certain words and using appropriate volume and intonation. Rasinski (2004a) distinguishes between three dimensions of reading fluency: accuracy in word decoding, speed and automaticity in word recognition, and expresiveness and meaningfulness in interpretation of a text, i.e. prosody. Absence of these three dimensions in reading results in comprehension difficulty. A child