Screening tests widely used to identify children with reading problems are being misapplied, landing students in the wrong instructional level and delaying treatment for their true difficulties, says new research from National-Louis University and the University of Maryland.
The researchers find that oral reading tests fail to distinguish between children who can't understand words on a page and those who have language problems that make it difficult to prove their reading competence verbally. Children with these so-called “word-finding” difficulties can't manage to say out loud what they read on the page.
The study, published in the November 2007 issue of “Reading Psychology,” recommends silent reading tests and limited use of oral ones.
The researchers estimate that as many as ten percent of all children may have these speech language problems. Roughly one-in-five children have some kind of learning difficulty, and nearly half of these have the “word-finding” problem.
“The look on these children's faces captures the problem in the most compelling way,” says Diane German, the principal researcher, who specializes in disorders of word-finding and a special education professor at National-Louis University in Chicago, Illinois. “They really struggle when they have to read a simple word like ‘nest' out loud. Some grimace, others look stuck. Some just blurt out an answer that's almost always wrong. Yet when asked to point to the same word on a page, they almost always get it right. Clearly they've got a problem and need help, but it's not that they lack reading skills.”
One child in the study, previously diagnosed with these “word-finding” difficulties, couldn't say “cocoon” as he tried to read a story aloud. When he got to the word, he stumbled and added, “You know, it is that brown thing hanging in the tree.”
“Clearly, this child had managed to ‘read' the word to himself and comprehend it, or he could never have come up with that kind of description,” explains psychologist Rochelle Newman, co-author of the study and a University of Maryland professor of hearing and speech sciences. “He just couldn't retrieve the sound pattern of the word.”
While word-finding difficulties are relatively common, German and Newman say it's unclear how many of these children end up mislabeled by schools. All 25 of the students in the experiment diagnosed with word-finding difficulties had been put in remedial reading classes at school – unnecessarily, based on the study results. These are probably not isolated cases, the researchers say.