Reading comprehension interventions

Intervention studies on improving reading comprehension skills, often include top-down strategy instruction or bottom-up vocabulary enhancing activities (e.g., National Reading Panel, 2000). Different studies showed that interventions teaching multiple comprehension strategies (such as predicting, clarifying, summarizing, and questioning) to students in the elementary grades can be effective in enhancing text comprehension (e.g., Droop, Van Elsäcker, Voeten, & Verhoeven, 2016; National Reading Panel, 2000; Spörer, Brunstein, & Kieschke, 2009). However, to be able to use most of these strategies, single word meanings have to be known and at least some kind of mental representation has to be present. It can therefore be argued that interventions focusing on vocabulary and integration processes might be effective in enhancing the ability to comprehend written text as well.

Vocabulary knowledge is essential for reading comprehension and although teaching word meanings can be achieved via a variety of relatively easy instructional strategies (e.g., providing definitions and “drill and practice” methods), not all vocabulary instruction programs are effective in enhancing reading comprehension (Baumann, 2009; Nagy, 1988). Stahl and Fairbanks (1986) suggested that vocabulary instructions should include three aspects in order to be effective in promoting passage comprehension: (1) instruction should provide both definitional and contextual information, (2) instruction should include more than one encounter with the target word, and (3) instruction should include high levels of word processing, such as generative processing, or the production of novel responses.

Different attempts have been made to enhance reading comprehension via vocabulary instruction. Systematic reviews, examining vocabulary interventions with reading comprehension outcomes, indicated that there is little evidence that vocabulary interventions (both direct teaching of word meanings and teaching of word-learning strategies) improve generalized reading comprehension (Elleman, Lindo, Morphy, & Compton, 2009; Wright & Cervetti, 2016). Few studies did succeed in enhancing comprehension ability through vocabulary (related) instruction. Both Lesaux, Kieffer, Faller, and Kelley (2010) and Brinchmann et al. (2015) developed interventions in which vocabulary instruction was embedded in a meaningful context (expository texts) and activities required higher levels of processing (e.g., reading articles and discussing target words, creating definitions, answering text-based questions, and writing paragraphs using the specific target words). Significant program effects were found for standardized measures of reading comprehension in both studies. Both Lesaux et al. (2010) and Brinchmann et al. (2015) indicated that, amongst others, discussion of the text-activities (including discussion on how words were related) not only resulted in vocabulary growth but that it also resulted in a more meaning-oriented way of reading. Although these more integration-oriented approaches seem promising, to our knowledge, interventions explicitly

training these word-to-text integration skills have not been carried out, or at least have not been documented.

In sum, results from previous attempts to enhance reading comprehension showed that vocabulary oriented interventions should be embedded in a meaningful context with high levels of word-processing. Although it has been evidenced that knowing words is not enough to understand a text and that to arrive at text comprehension readers actively have to use word-to-text integration skills, this phase in comprehending written text has been neglected in intervention research. Where students are directly taught how to decode words and how to use word-solving strategies, students often do not receive instruction on how to apply word-to-text integration skills, or to be more explicit, how to connect the meaning of a word, as it is read, to a representation of the text. This phase seems crucial in comprehending written text and might explain why solely teaching vocabulary often does not enhance reading comprehension skill. With the intervention presented in the current study we aimed at enhancing reading comprehension skill by explicitly training word-to-text integration skills.

5.1.3 Present study

The present study evaluated a newly designed reading comprehension intervention, aimed at improving word-to-text integration skills. Word-to-text integration refers to the process of actively integrating single word meanings into text propositions and a representation of the text as a whole. A clustered randomized controlled trial pretest posttest follow-up design was used. The word-to-text integration intervention (from now on WTTI intervention) was designed for students in the intermediate grades of elementary school, the phase in which students normally have acquired automatized word decoding skills. Students in the experimental condition completed (1) assignments to familiarize them with difficult words they encountered in the texts used in the intervention and (2) assignments aimed at improving reading comprehension skills by focusing on word-to-text integration processes. Students in the control condition continued with their business as usual. Both before (pretest), directly after (posttest), and six months after finishing the intervention (follow-up), students completed an expository and narrative reading comprehension test, and both a WTTI intervention-based and standardized vocabulary test to examine the impact of the WTTI intervention. To be able to control for some well-known predictors of reading comprehension skill, measures of decoding, short-term memory, and nonverbal reasoning skill were also administered during pretest.

With respect to the impact of interventions, Lesaux, Kieffer, Kelley, & Harris (2014) have suggested that “while an overall estimation of a treatment’s effect provides an indication of its effectiveness at the population level, it does not shed light on the relative efficacy of the approach. Investigating its effect as a function of variability in students’ skills … is essential to improving the match between instruction and students’ needs” (pp. 7). Therefore, additional

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