Literacy comprehension in preschool students

A recent podcast on Voice of Literacy featured Dr. Katherine Strasser who studies story comprehension among preschool children. Studies have indicated that children who were read to from an early age develop better reading and literacy skills than those who were not read to. Dr. Strasser wants to know why oral reading effects the development of written text comprehension skills.

Whether someone is reading a story or another form of text, the reader must establish connections between sentences and construct a representation of the whole text in order to comprehend what is being read. This task is required both in oral story comprehension as well as written story comprehension. Oral language development occurs more quickly than written language development. Because of this relationship, Strasser comments on the importance of reading to children at a young age. She provided the following example to make her point, “If a student can read Frog and Toad then that student can comprehend Harry Potter.” Parents should read stories with complex emotions and plots and have conversations about character motivations, goals, and problems that arise in the story. Developing these skills early on will help students to apply them once they are able to decode the text themselves. Making inferences, connecting sentences to one another to form a new idea, and monitoring one’s comprehension are all skills that should be developed at a young age. While these tend to be focused on in second grade, Strasser points out that these should even be taught to kindergarten-age students. The earlier students learn and apply these skills, the greater potential for literacy development in the future. Using wordless picture books is another way that Dr. Strasser suggests in helping develop early comprehension skills. This form of literacy does not require a parent to read the book to the child and allows the student to work on his or her visual literacy comprehension. Wordless picture books may also be helpful in assessing a student’s level of comprehension at an earlier stage than his or her decoding ability.

Dr. Strasser stresses the need to focus on comprehension and deeper literacy skills because of the difficulty in measuring these areas. Government mandated tests tend to measure fluency and speed, but these skills can be developed without an equal level of comprehension growth. When speed and decoding are emphasized, students may gain a false concept of reading as decoding rather than as understanding and forming new ideas. Policy makers and principals should acknowledge the importance of oral language development and its apparent connection to reading comprehension by allotting time for teachers to focus on this in the classroom. The difficulty in measuring comprehension does not mean that it deserves less time in the classroom.

In the future, Dr. Strasser would like to form experimental studies to help determine what experiences and interactions with literature help children grow in their ability to form inferences and monitor their understanding as they read.

Fortunately, I have observed a pronounced focus in the classroom on literacy comprehension. Although this area may not be of primary importance on standardized tests, teachers are making concerted efforts to discuss themes, conflicts, character motivations, and plot as they read stories to their students. I make this a focus when I read to students in the classroom as well.

I enjoy reading stories to children but have always leaned toward picture books and never really discussed the book afterward when reading to children outside the classroom. Dr. Strasser discussed the importance of talking about books with children at an early age as well as reading more complex books or novels with children. I had assumed that reading novels to young children might be boring for them because of the lack of pictures; however, Dr. Strasser indicated that these could be just as entertaining for young minds. I will definitely begin to read a greater variety of books to the children I read to outside of the classroom.