PRAGMATIC CRITERIA AND THE PREDICTION OF READING ACHIEVEMENT: AN EXAMINATION OF QUALITATIVE LANGUAGE DIFFERENCES (STORY GRAMMAR, DISCOURSE, ASSESSMENT)

This study evaluated stories told by 150 kindergarten and first grade subjects for qualitative differences in their ability to use language. It was proposed that children who were poor readers would not be able to use language at a displaced symbolic level, and thus would have difficulty interpreting, organizing and specifying the elements of a story. It was therefore hypothesized that poor readers would exhibit qualitatively poorer stories, as reflected in criteria designed to evaluate the interpretation, organization and specification of the story. Subjects viewed a sequence of pictures, generated a corresponding story, and recounted the story to a listener (i.e., a puppet) who had not seen the pictures. Fourteen pragmatic criteria, including failure to provide significant orienting information, failure to use temporal, spatial or causal terms to establish relationships between situations or events, message inaccuracies, and false starts or linguistic nonfluencies, were used to analyze the narratives. For each pragmatic variable, an error ratio consisting of the number of errors per proposition used in the generation of the story was derived. A discriminant function analysis indicated that the pragmatic variables were successful at discriminating between the high and low reading groups. Similarly, multiple regression analyses revealed significant relationships between the pragmatic errors and reading achievement for individual subjects. No age/grade differences were found: first grade poor readers were more similar to kindergarten poor readers in the ability to use language than they were to either kindergarten or first grade good readers. The results of this study are consistent with the notion that qualitative language differences exist between good and poor readers relative to their ability to use language to interpret, organize and specify the elements of a story. These results suggest the need for follow-up studies that evaluate the effectiveness of intervention strategies that provide instruction congruent with a child\u27s language level and enhance a transition to more organized and displaced use of language