Effects of training in rapid decoding on the reading comprehension of adult ESL learners

Journal o f Behavioral Education, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1994, pp. 177-189

Effects of Training in Rapid Decoding on the Reading Comprehension of Adult ESL Learners

Annette Tan, B.A., 1 Dennis W. Moore, Ph.D., 2,5 Robyn S. Dixon, M.A., 3 and Tom Nichoison, Ph.D. 4

We report an experimental investigation of the effects on comprehension of increasing the decoding speed of three adult learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). Participants were taught to read lists of 25 difficult words in isolation until they couM read the entire list at a mean rate of not more than 1.5 secs per word. They were then asked to read passages containing these words. Decoding speed and accuracy measures, for both the word lists and passages, and passage comprehension measures, were obtained. In a temporally contiguous within-subjects repeated trials reversal design, decoding training on isolated words was shown to be associated with significant increases in decoding speed and accuracy both in isolation and context, and improvements in the participants' comprehension. With all participants rate and accuracy gains in context were maintained in the final reversal phase, though the comprehension score gains did not. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for a decoding sufficiency hypothesis.

KEY WORDS: ESL; reading comprehension; decoding sufficiency.

Reading is a complex activity calling on a range of perceptual, linguistic, cognitive and metacognitive skills. Good and bad readers have been shown

1Graduate Student, Department of Education, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.

2Senior Lecturer, Department of Education, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. 3Lecturer, Department of Education, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. 4Associate Professor, Department of Education, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.

5Correspondence should be directed to Dennis W. Moore, Department of Education, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand.

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178 Tan, Moore, Dixon, and Nicholson

to differ in their orthographic knowledge (Clay, 1972), vocabulary (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982; Davis, 1968), decoding accuracy (Guthrie, 1973) and speed (Golinkoff & Rosinski, 1976), as well as in aspects of their memory for discourse (Gildemeister & Friedman, 1986), metacognitive knowledge (Pads, Wasik, & Van der Westhuizen, 1988) and attributions regarding reading success and failure (Wagner, Spratt, Gal, & Pads, 1989).

With both first and second language learners, difficulties with reading are often traceable to deficits at the level of word recognition. Indeed, vocabulary training has long been a basic component of reading instruction for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners (Bernhardt, 1984). Researchers have also shown that more skilled comprehenders are also able to name printed words faster than less skilled comprehenders (Hogaboam & Perfetti, 1978; Perfetti & Hogaboam, 1975), particularly with unfamil- iar and multisyllable words (Frederiksen, 1978). Perfetti and Hogaboam (1975) developed a "shared limited capacity" hypothesis to account for the observed relationship between decoding proficiency or speed, and comprehension. Briefly, this hypothesis posits that the observed relationship between decoding speed and comprehension is a function of the reader being required to share limited cognitive processing resources between the two activities. When decoding uses an excessive proportion of an individual's processing capacity, a "bottleneck" occurs and fewer resources are available for imposing meaning on the material. Thus inef- ficient decoding will lead to restricted comprehension. With repeated practice readers achieve a degree of automaticity in decoding such that they recognize written words without the need to allocate attention to the task (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974). Consequently, as decoding skills develop, text is increasingly identified automatically, releasing processing resources for tasks associated with comprehension.

Fleisher, Jenkins, and Pany (1979) noted that both strong and weak formulations of the shared capacity hypothesis are possible. In the former, accelerated decoding is a sufficient condition for enhanced comprehension. In the weak form of the hypothesis increased decoding speed is seen as necessary but not sufficient for improved comprehension. Particular comprehension-fostering skills might be needed, for example, in addition to the released processing space for comprehension gains to occur.

Fleisher et al. (1979), noting the relative difficulty of testing the weaker formulation of this hypothesis, reported two studies designed to test the decoding sufficiency form of the bottleneck model. Poor readers were trained to read both individual words and phrases at speeds equivalent to those previously observed with good readers and then required to read a brief passage made up of all the practiced words. Both studies found that the decoding training increased reading speed on the words

Rapid Decoding Training and Comprehension 179

in isolation. But, contrary to the decoding-sufficiency view, comprehension performance was not affected in either study. The issue remains con- troversial, however. The Fleisher et al. study has been challenged on methodological grounds (Blanchard & McNinch, 1980) and Blanchard (1980) has, in addition, reported results for poor sixth-grade readers, showing that training in single-word decoding did improve literal and in- ferential comprehension.

The present study is a systematic replication of the work by Fleisher et al. (1979), employing single-subject experimental methodology that permits a more ideographic analysis of the relationship between decoding rate and comprehension, while simultaneously enabling a closer inspection of changes in behavior over time (McCormick, 1990). The study was designed to further examine the shared capacity or bottleneck account for the observed relationship between decoding speed and comprehension levels by testing the effect on adult ESL learners' comprehension of independently increasing their decoding speed.

METHOD

Participants

Three adults, two men and one woman, participated in the study. All were recent immigrants to New Zealand and were learning English as a second language. At the outset of the study, the Neale Analysis of Reading Behaviour (1989) was administered to each of the participants as a measure of their preintervention competence in reading English.

Subject 1, a 26-year-old Japanese man, obtained an age-equivalent score of 9.03 on reading rate, 7.05 for reading accuracy, and 6.06 for comprehension. Subject 2, a 35-year-old man from Mainland China, attained scores of 7.08 (rate), 7.04 (accuracy), and 6.09 (comprehension), and the third subject, a 34-year-old Cambodian woman, achieved scores of 7.07 (rate), 6.11 (accuracy) and 6.01 (comprehension).

Materials

Fifteen short stories, varying in length from 336 to 500 words, were selected from back-issues of The School Journal published between 1975 and 1984. The passages were all graded at the 7-year comprehension level and, thus, were approximately one-year equivalent in advance of the tested competence of the participants.


For each passage, a word list was constructed consisting of 25 difficult words selected from the passage but presented in random order. These words were selected from those nouns, adjectives and adverbs in the passage with which the participants were considered likely to be least familiar. Finally, comprehension tests constructed for each of these passages by Tang and Moore (1992) were employed. Each test consisted of ten text-explicit and two text implicit questions (Pearson & Johnson, 1978).

Design

The study employed a within-subjects reversal design (Barlow & Hersen, 1984), with independent but temporally contiguous replications of each experimental condition across three subjects. Thus, the effects of training were compared both within and across subjects.

Procedure

All participants attended three experimental sessions per week for the duration of the study. All sessions were conducted by the first author, on a one-to-one basis, and took place in quiet, secluded rooms in the participants' own homes. All sessions were overtly audio recorded to permit subsequent analysis. Training procedures, measures, and criteria for con- cluding practice during the intervention detailed by Fleisher et al. (1979) were adhered to in all respects.

Baseline

Participants were given the word list for one of the passages and asked to read it aloud as fast, but as accurately as they could. Elapsed time and the total number of errors or mispronunciations were recorded. Mis- pronunciations were operationally defined to include broken words, where a word is pronounced as two words, for example, "a / way" (Clay, 1979). Next the participants were provided with the corresponding passage and requested to read it aloud. Instructions for reading the passages stressed reading for meaning and also informed the participant that questions about the story would follow. Immediately on completion of this task, and without further reference to this written material, the participants answered the orally presented comprehension questions.


While each participant was reading, the instructor took a running record of oral reading responses (Clay, 1979). All substitutions, inser- tions, omissions, and inventions (including mispronunciations) were noted as errors. The total time taken to read the passage was also recorded.

All meaning change errors were corrected by the instructor so that decoding inaccuracies would not detract from participants' comprehension.

Intervention

Throughout the Intervention phase words from the word list were printed separately on standard .076 x .127 m index cards, creating a 25- card stack for each session. The participants practiced these words in flash- card drill until they could recognize each word within approximately one second. They were then presented with the randomly ordered list and required to read this accurately at an average rate of not more than one and a half seconds per word. Following Fleisher et al. (1979), the participants were allowed a maximum of two suffix changes, these to be recorded as errors, without having to repractice the words. No other errors on the word-list test were permitted. Had the participants failed to reach this performance criterion they would have been required to rehearse the flash-card deck again before re-reading the word list. This eventuality did not occur. All subsequent experimental procedures followed those observed in Baseline.

Reversal

The final five-day phase of the study entailed a designed reversal of conditions to those extant in the initial Baseline phase.

Measures

Five reading related behaviors were measured in this study: 1) mean time taken (seconds) to read the isolated words in the word list; 2) mean time taken (seconds) to read all the words in the assigned passages; 3) percentage accuracy of reading words in the word list; 4) percentage accuracy of reading words in the passages; and 5) percentage of questions correctly answered in the daily 12 item comprehension test.


Reading rate, both in isolation and with the passages, was calculated by dividing the total time taken by the number of words read. These two variables were measured to verify the efficacy of the rapid decoding training, a measure of the integrity of the intervention. If, during the Interven- tion phase, training on the 25 words in the daily word list was not associated with an increase in decoding rate in both the word lists and in the text passages, the study would not provide opportunity to examine possible transfer to comprehension effe'cts. The data on the accuracy with which the words were read in isolation is also reported as a measure of treatment integrity. The accuracy in context data on the other hand were obtained to assay possible changes in decoding accuracy on the prose passages, a potential concomitant outcome of the training which could confound the effects of the independent variable. The number of questions correctly answered in the daily 12-item comprehension test served as the dependent variable.

Reliability Measures

All tape-recorded answers to the comprehension questions were scored by two independent raters. Inter-rater reliability was assessed by cal- culating the percent agreement between the two raters. Session agreement was computed by dividing the total number of agreements by the total number of agreements plus disagreements. Inter-rater reliability was 100%.

RESULTS

The mean time each subject took to read the words in the word list is presented in Table I, with associated standard deviations, separately for each experimental phase. During the Intervention phase, the time all subjects took to read these words in isolation was reduced from levels sub- stantially exceeding the criterion level of one and a half seconds per word average, to well below this level. The Reversal condition was associated with a return to near-Baseline reading rates.

The mean time each participant took to read each word in the passages during Baseline, Intervention, and Reversal phases is presented in Figure 1. The introduction of the intervention was associated with a clear decrease in time per word in context. Subject 1 moved from a mean of .76 sees per word to .66 sees, Subject 2, from .92 sees. to .78 sees, and Subject 3 from .84 sees to .72 sees. Furthermore, the increased rate of reading in context was maintained in the subsequent Reversal phase.

Rapid Decoding Training and Comprehension

Table I. Mean Tune in Seconds (and Standard Deviations) to Read Single Words in Isolation for Each Subject Across Experimental Phases

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Experimental Phases

Baseline Intervention Reversal

Subject 1 2.24 (.18) 1.06 (.09) 2.06 (.18)

Subject 2 2.90 (.22) 1.04 (.09) 2.50 (.14)

Subject 3 3.10 (.66) 1.12 (.11) 2.88 (.46)

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Table 11. Mean Percentage Accuracy (and Standard Deviations) in Reading Words in Isolation for Each Subject Across Experimental Phases

Experimental Phases


Subject 1 85.9 (6.25) 100.0 (.0) 78.4 (11.06) Subject 2 89.3 (2.47) 100.0 (.0) 85.3 (6.72) Subject 3 70.7 (13.87) 100.0 (.0) 71.0 (11.97)

Table IlL Mean Percentage Accuracy (and Standard Deviations) in Reading Words in Passages for Each Subject Across Experimental Phases

Experimental Phases


Subject 1 95.8 (1.09) 98.0 (.71) 96.6 (1.14) Subject 2 96.2 (.84) 98.2 (.84) 97.8 (.84) Subject 3 94.0 (1.87) 97.0 (.71) 96.6 (1.14)

Participants' mean reading accuracy on the word lists and the passages are presented in Tables II and III respectively. Accuracy rates were calculated by dividing the total number of errors by the number of running words in the list or passage, and multiplying the result by 100. As is shown in Table II, the training provided in Intervention was associated with an improvement in accuracy of reading in the daily word lists to 100% accuracy for all participants. This increase was not maintained in the Reversal condition. In the reading in context task (passages), all three participants were again most ac- curate in the Intervention phase (see Table III).

Mean daily comprehension scores for each participant across the various phases of the study are presented in Figure 2. The introduction of the Inter- vention phase was associated with an increase in daily comprehension scores for all subjects: from a mean of 49.9% to 88.3% for Subject 1; from 50% to 84.9% for Subject 2; and from 41.7% to 76.6% for Subject 3. Interrupted time series analysis employing the DMITSA z~ procedure (Crosbie & Sharpley, 1989; 1991) showed that the change between Baseline and Intervention was statistically significant in both level and slope for Subject 1, F(2, 4) = 10.89, p < .05; Subject 2, F(2, 4) = 38.63, p < .005; and Subject 3, F(2, 4) = 9.61, p < .05. The designed reversal of experimental conditions in the final phase of the study was associated with an overall reduction in comprehension scores such that all participants were performing at or about Baseline levels, with Reversal phase means of 59.9%, 38.3%, and 46.7% for Subjects 1, 2, and 3 respectively.

Rapid Decoding Training and Comprehension

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Fig. 2. Mean percent correct in daily comprehension tests across experimental phases.

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DISCUSSION

The same pattern of results occurred with the reading rate, accuracy, and comprehension measures for all three participants in this study. The introduction of the Intervention phase was associated with a significant increase in rate of reading, both in isolation and when reading the associated prose passages, thereby demonstrating the efficacy of the intervention in increasing reading rate in context. However, the subsequent experimental withdrawal of the intervention in the Reversal phase was associated with a decrease in reading rate in the word lists task only. With the passages, all participants continued reading at increased rates, indistinguishable from those observed in the Intervention phase, in the Reversal condition.


Similarly, in all cases, the experimental intervention was associated with a clear improvement in the accuracy with which the participants read both the 25 isolated words in the daily word lists and the associated passages. Again however, only on the word-list task was a return to base rate accuracy levels noted in the Reversal phase. This may indicate some gen- eralization of treatment effects over time, both on rate and accuracy of reading, to new, un-trained passages. Further, the results of the daily comprehension tests showed improvements for all three participants temporally associated with the introduction of the decoding training and, in all cases, a subsequent decline in tested comprehension in the final experimental Re- versal phase.

These data show that the word-drill intervention was successful in increasing the speed with which the participants read the words in isolation to normative levels identified by Fleisher et al. (1979). This, together with the associated increase in reading rate in context throughout the intervention, provides a good measure of the integrity of the introduction of the independent variable in this study (Peterson, Homer, & Wonderlich, 1982).

The observed pattern of results does not conform with the processing bottleneck hypothesis (Perfetti & Hogaboam, 1975). Training on words in isolation was associated with increased reading rates and comprehension of passages containing these words over the five days of intervention as would be predicted by the decoding-sufficiency hypothesis. However, this rate gain when reading the passages was maintained in the subsequent experimental condition in which the word drill was not provided prior to reading the scripts. Furthermore, despite this improved reading rate, participants' tested comprehension dropped to levels comparable with those in Baseline; the increased rate of reading, generalized from a context in which the participants had received prior word drill, was not sufficient to sustain effective comprehension of the assigned reading material. One possibility is that the study failed to produce data congruent with the bottleneck hypothesis be- cause the participants' rate of reading was not increased beyond some mini- mum threshold to achieve sufficient automaticity to release processing resources for the task of comprehension. If all passage words had been trained to automaticity, instead of just 25, then there may have been much more impact on overall rate of reading. However, we note that all participants attained a words-in-isolation rate below the normative threshold es- tablished in Fleisher et al. (1979). In addition, in the present study, comprehension did improve in the Intervention phase, during which the participants' rate of reading was not significantly different to that observed in the Reversal condition where comprehension dropped, suggesting that rate of reading for passages was not the significant variable in this process.


Maintenance of the increased rate of reading of the passages in the Reversal phase was not anticipated. We presume that this is a learned outcome, a consequence of the volume of English reading experience these ESL learners, already literate in their first languages, were provided. Simi- larly, the short-term gains in their comprehension scores, lasting only for the duration of the intervention, and apparently functionally independent of the changes in reading rate, also need explanation. We suspect that the daily process of the word drill, providing repeated practice in decoding and saying 25 difficult words, typically nouns and verbs, may have functioned as a prior organizer for the material, providing a meaning structure for the following passage. However, it is hard to see how 25 randomly learned words out of a story of 300-500 words could have given enough prior meaning to assist sufficiently with comprehension. Another possible explanation is that rate of reading in the passages was not a sensitive indicator of the automaticity that had been achieved, as shown in the rate of reading for the word lists, where speed improved in the intervention phase, but dropped again in the reversal phase.

The ideographic detail the study provides regarding the participants' learning processes and the nature of the relationship between reading rate and comprehension further illustrates the potential that single-subject methodology has for reading research (see McCormick, 1990). However, two design limitations restrict the external validity of this study. Firstly, external obligations made it necessary to introduce each phase of the study simultaneously across the three subjects rather than implementing them in a multiple baseline, thereby reducing the power of the study to a within- subject reversal, replicated across three subjects. Secondly, the reading material was not counter-balanced across subjects/experimental conditions. Although the 15 stories were presented in random order, all three participants were given the same passage for each session. This permits direct daily comparison across the participants, however, it also leaves open the possibility of differential stimulus complexity across phases confounding the effects of the independent variable. However, given that the passages were all graded at the same level of reading difficulty, and that there were five different and randomly sequenced passages in each condition, the possibility of such an experimental confound is minimal.

From an instructional perspective, the data from this study suggest that for adult and already literate ESL learners, isolated word drill has limited utility beyond the passages in which the trained words occur. Al- though such drill was useful in producing improved reading s p e e d - improvements which generalized to the associated passages, both during and after the intervention--long term gains in reading comprehension were not evident. The data from the reversal phase of this study suggest that


enhanced decoding speed as a result of word drill is not a sufficient condition for improved general reading comprehension. Yet the results do give support to Gough and Tunmer's (1986) "simple view" that reading comprehension depends on both decoding skill and general language comprehension. The poor ESL readers in this study needed help in both these areas. It would seem, then, that the reading comprehension of ESL learners would be best improved by direct instruction in both decoding skill (Nicholson, 1993) and in cognitive and metacognitive comprehension-fostering strate- gies (Tang & Moore, 1992).

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Effects of training in rapid decoding on the reading comprehension of adult ESL learners