Didactica

13
The Acquisition ofReading Comprehension Skill
charles A. Pe~1ettI,I~cole Lanti and Jane 0*IiI
How do people acquire skill at comprehending what they read? That is the simple question to which we shall try to make a tentative answer. To begin, we have to acknowledge some complexities about the concept of reading comprehension and what it means to develop it.

Introduction: Simple Ideasabout Reading Comprehension
We can expect the comprehension of written language to approximate the comprehension of spoken language. When that happens, then reading comprehension has developed, for practical purposes, to its limiting or asymptotic level. (It is possible for reading comprehension skill to develop so as to exceed listening comprehension skill, but that is another matter.) All otherlimitations are imposed by linguistic abilities, relevantknowl~ edge, and general intelligence. If we make things more complex than this, we push onto the concept of reading comprehension all these other important aspects ofcognition, with the muddle that results from conceptual conflation. This simple idea that the acquisition of reading comprehension is learning to understand writing as well asone understands spoken language has empirical justification. At the beginning of learning to read, the correlations between reading and spoken language comprehension are small (Curtis, 1980; Sticht & James, 1984). This is because at the beginning, childien are learning to decode and identify words, so it is these word-reading processes that limit comprehension. However, as children move beyond thebeginnings oflearning to read, the correlationsbetween reading comprehension and spoken language comprehension increase and then level out by high school (Sticht & James, 1984). As children learn to read words, the limiting factor in reading comprehension shifts from word recognition to spoken language comprehension. For adult college student samples,

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Charles A. Perfitti, Nicole Landi,and Jane Oakhill

The Acquisition of Reading (Jomprehension Skil~’ 229

the correlation between scores on reading comprehension and listening comprehension tests reaches r = .90 (Gernsbacher, 1990). If tisis were the end of tlse story, then the study of reading comprehension would fold completely into the study of language comprehension. However, there is probably more to the story. First aresome methodological considerations. Studies that compare reading comprehension witis listening comprehension avoid the confounding of materials, making a clean comparison between the same or equivalent passages with oniy the “modality” (speech or writing) different. But for most people, what they usually Isear is different in content and style from what they read. These differences extend throughformal, semantic, and pragmatic dimensions of language. Thus, what is necessary for experimental control is problematic for authenticity. Second, one must make a decision about the speech rate in such comparisons. What is the proper rate for a comparison with reading? The listener’s preference? The speaker’s preference? A rate equal to the reading rate? Finally, we take note of a more interestingpossibility; namely that literacy may alter the way people process spoken language (Olson, 1977). If so, this would hoost the correlation of listening and reading comprehension in adulthood. We accept, approximately and in an idealized form, the assumption that reading comprehension is the joint product of printed word identification and listening comprehension, an idea fansously asserted by Coughand Tunmer (1986) ass simple view of reading. However, we also must assume that learning to read with comprehension brings enough additional complexities to justify a chapter on how that happens.

A Framework for Comprehension
flgUl’e 13.1

Comprehension occurs as tise reader builds a mental representation of a text nsessage. (for a review of current ideas about reading comprehension in...