Allen, M.A., Ukrainetz, T.A., & Carswell, A.L. (2012).
The narrative language performance of three types of at-risk first-grade
readers. Language, Speech, and Hearing
Services in Schools, 43. 205-221.
Response to Intervention (RTI) is
a three-tiered approach to identifying and supporting children with reading
difficulties. In order to read fluently, a reader must be skilled in both
decoding and comprehension. Decoding
involves recognizing letters and their corresponding sounds, while
comprehension requires the reader to put words together to understand a whole
sentence or text. In this study, Allen, Ukrainetz, and Carswell suggest that
current RTI models are mainly focused on the decoding processes required in
reading, but pay less attention to the linguistic aspects of reading.
In this study, first grade at-risk
readers completed measures of expressive and receptive language at 2 points in
the school year and prior to intervention. Early resolvers who demonstrated an
improvement of reading skills continued with the Tier 1 classroom program. The
remaining children received four-weeks of Tier 2 intervention focusing on
either fluency or accuracy. Those who
received the intervention were grouped as good or poor responders based on the
intervention outcome. The retrospective analysis revealed that narrative skills
as measured in story retelling (story length; number & variety of words)
were better for the good responders than either the poor responders or early
resolvers. The early resolvers also used less productive language and recounted
fewer elements of the narratives compared to the good responders.
The authors
suggested that good responders may have had early reading differences related
to experience, but had stronger language skills to support their reading
improvement throughout the intervention. The early responders, who demonstrated
reading skills expected for their grade, still demonstrated language
difficulties on the narrative retell task. Because responses to the code-based
RTI model differed based on narrative language skills, the authors argued that
RTI models should also consider linguistic aspects of reading difficulty. Including
a narrative language component in RTI models would widen the scope of RTI
models to identify and support children with language deficits.
Blogger: Alex
Cross is completing a combined MClSc and PhD in speech language pathology. Her
work focusing on reading will be part of both the Language and Working Memory
and the Language, Reading, and Cognitive Neuroscience labs.
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