Decoding accuracy, vocabulary knowledge and comprehension

Hu and Nation in Nation (2001) concluded that in a written fiction text, learners needed to know 98% of the running words in order to gain adequate comprehension. This brings tight constraints to bear upon the texts that are presented to children to read that will ensure a good measure of understanding and success. It also supports the importance of having a measure of the density of low frequency vocabulary contained in a text. The basic idea of familiarity and vocabulary knowledge is that of the exposure theory, which explains the development of receptive or hearing vocabulary (Miller and Gildea, 1987; Stenner, Smith and Burdick, 1983). Educators are generally in agreement that productive language ability is basic to reading comprehension. Productive language ability is heavily dependent upon the vocabulary bank that a speaker has available to draw upon. A poorly stocked vocabulary bank impacts on understanding for both listening and reading. Krashen’s (1989) comprehensible input hypothesis concurs in stating that when too much input vocabulary is unfamiliar, loss of meaning occurs. Nicholson (1997) describes this as a bottleneck problem, which, while it may not always affect overall comprehension, it does interrupt precise understanding at the sentence level. This difficulty was borne out during the comprehension testing. While some students got the overall gist of the story, they still came away with some key content information missing. There is a danger for students and teachers alike, in believing that gleaning the general meaning is an acceptable level of understanding. For second language learners this can often become the goal; that is, just to get the general idea rather than fully engaging with the text and details. As a consequence, opportunities for strengthening and enriching mental vocabulary, learning from the text, and

engaging with the deeper cultural capital which is invested in these texts, may be lost. High expectations must be maintained with regard to comprehension, especially so with second language learners, most particularly because there are limited exposure opportunities compared to peers who are immersed in the dominant community language.

Reading is often described as an interactive process, not just a passive process of vocalising an interpretation of graphic images. Much of the difficult or ‘stopper’ vocabulary in Mäori language texts is ably ‘read’ or more to the point ‘said’ with accuracy. The regular phonemic nature of the Mäori language makes verbalizing text at the word level quite simple compared to some languages. However, it becomes evident in vocabulary checks that the meaning of these words often remains a mystery to the reader. As previously mentioned, sometimes making errors can intensify the interaction with the text and have a positive impact on understanding. In the long term, however, the aim of becoming a fluent reader is to gain momentum in comprehension. The less slowing down, correcting mistakes and stumbling over stopper words, the better. Readers expect the task of decoding to become less laborious as they progress and achieving a reasonable speed and good meaning make reading at the middle to upper end of schooling more pleasurable. Students move more competently from learning to read, to another level of reading to learn which places further demands on provision of materials with more content specific criteria. McDowell and Boyd (2005) identify this as an area that requires further attention, especially in regard to students moving from the junior school to the middle school. At this stage students are likely to be newly independent readers, or in transition from teacher- directed instructional reading to student-directed reading. Hancock (1999 in McDowell & Boyd 2005) says there is a risk of negative impact on student confidence that can occur for newly independent readers when faced with books that are too hard. Continued assistance in book selection for newly independent readers is important. Hancock (1999) provides strategies to support students’

transition to independent reading. These are beyond implementation in Mäori- medium settings until the reading material has the necessary criteria assigned to texts, and there are more carefully organised transitional material available. May et al. (2004) assert that academic language proficiency never occurs automatically. It needs to be specifically taught. Higher level texts play a significant part in achieving this.

Another interesting feature noted was that students who had a high miscue and self-correction rate, often had good comprehension of the text. In fact, their comprehension results were often better than those of students who gave a flawless rendition, but whose comprehension results showed only minimal literal or surface understanding. The readers with high self-correction rates also used reading forward and backward strategies to sense grammatical constraints to solve a word. This presented again in their ability to strategise syntactically in this way during the vocabulary check. A student that had to stop and crack the code of a text as they went, seemed to engage more with meaning as a tool to get through the text. As a result, they employed deeper thinking in the reading process. (May et al., 2004) affirms for us that, while accuracy results for decoding texts, are useful, they are much less important than comprehension and vocabulary knowledge results. This supports the idea that measuring the lexical burden is important for educators to gauge the level of interaction and cognitive processing required in any given text.Figures 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8 compare the level of accuracy, comprehension and vocabulary knowledge attained by readers for each text in this study. The results for each group of students are shown separately. This information confirms what previous studies nationally have shown for some readers of Mäori: that accuracy quickly outstrips comprehension (Berryman et al., 2001; Bishop et al., 2001; Glynn et al., 1996). Accuracy measures can create an impression of successful reading, but measures of comprehension quickly show otherwise, especially at the fluency level. This aspect of second language literacy acquisition has also been reported

internationally by Garcia (2003). Disparities between accuracy and comprehension can be compounded in second language learners of Mäori because of the phonemic regularity which makes the ‘saying’ of words relatively easy. This is not the case for all students, but is significant enough to be of concern.

Figure 3.6: The Percentage scores on Accuracy, Comprehension and Vocabulary Knowledge for each Kete Pïngao i Student

Figure 3.7: The Percentage scores on Accuracy, Comprehension and Vocabulary Knowledge for each Kete Pïngao o Student

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Students (KPi) Percentage scores Accuracy rate Comprehension Vocabulary knowledge 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Students (KPo) Pe rc en ta ge s co re s Accuracy rate Comprehension Vocabulary knowledge

Figure 3.8: Relationship Between Accuracy, Comprehension and Vocabulary Knowledge for each Kete Miro Student

While all of these groups are showing high accuracy in decoding, very few students have a rate of comprehension that is keeping pace with accuracy. The general trend shown here is that lowered comprehension rates correspond with low vocabulary knowledge. There appears to be a general drag down effect connecting the two. Stahl and Fairbanks (1986) reported that instruction aimed at increasing children’s vocabulary resulted in significantly higher levels of reading comprehension. The pool of available vocabulary is an aspect of proficiency in spoken language which directly affects the level of literacy that children will achieve. This gives clear direction to educators in bilingual programmes, about the attention to vocabulary growth needed to continually support levels of comprehension. 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Students (Miro) Pe rc en ta g e sc o re s Accuracy rate Comprehension Vocabulary knowledge