Early Ways To Predict Poor Readers

From: Let's Talk #11

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Children who read well tend to do well in school.

Those who have trouble reading, unless helped, generally have trouble with school. But typically, parents must wait for low grades or notes from the teacher to find out if their child is having trouble reading.

Now, new research from Boston University and Emerson College in Boston suggests that a child's performance on certain language tasks may predict later reading problems. This is true even when these children do not show clear signs of language difficulties in daily life, say the researchers.

"Children who have trouble reading often have underlying speech and language problems," says Paula Menyuk, professor of developmental studies and applied linguistics at Boston University.

One hundred eighty children were tested three times between the ages of 1/2 and 7 1/2. The tests examined the children's performance at different levels of language: sounds, words, sentences, and discourse. Then, when the children reached first or second grade, they were tested for oral language, reading, mathematics, and spelling abilities.

In the study, 48 children turned out to have reading problems. The language tasks used by the Boston researchers in the first part of the study identified 36 of these children.

Poor performance on three language tasks was an especially good predictor of later reading problems:

• understanding complex sentences, such as "The boy who kissed the girl ran away."

• selecting missing words in sentences, such as "The girls decorated the ______tree." (Christmas, big, bare)

• retrieving words rapidly, for example, quickly naming a series of 36 unrelated pictures.

Some of the children who had reading problems had nothing remarkable in their developmental histories except very low birthweight (under 1500 grams). Jacqueline Liebergott, professor of communication disorders at Emerson, speculated that these early medical difficulties may have had an effect on language development that was not apparent until the children started to learn to read.

Being able to predict which children will have trouble reading would allow speech-language pathologists and others to begin to work with them before they fail, says Menvuk.

Credits

It has been provided by American Speech-Language-Hearing Association,10801 Rockville Pike, Rockville, MD 20852.

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