[NLA] The "Scientific" Understanding of Reading

[Thomas Sticht]

Research Note                   2 February 2002
Tom Sticht

The "Scientific" Understanding of Reading and the "Reading Potential" of
Adults  Assessed by Measuring Listening and Reading Abilities 

The "scientific" work on reading that the National Reading Panel
reported and which forms the foundation for most of the Bush
administrations approach to literacy development takes its primary focus
from the idea that, developmentally,  children typically acquire
considerable competence in listening and comprehending speech before
they develop competence in reading and comprehending the written
language. Indeed, the whole idea behind the teaching of "phonemic
awareness,"  "phonics" and other speech-referenced "word attack"
techniques is that the learner's main task is considered to be to learn
how to "decode" the written language to reconstruct the spoken language
which can then be comprehended as usual. This is the idea of reading as
a second signaling system for listening to and comprehending the oral
language (for more on aspects of literacy that are not second signaling
systems for listening see the paper Teaching Reading With Adults under
Full Text documents at www.nald.ca  searched by my last name). 

The idea that listening competence develops first and that then reading
competence permits the learner to understand in writing that which could
earlier be understood only in the spoken language leads to the concept
of "reading potential." For children, the general notion is that they
enter school at the first grade with two types of receptive
communication abilities: listening and reading (there are, of course,
other communication abilities, but they are not the object of discussion
here). Typically, children can comprehend better by listening than by
reading in the primary grades. Hypothetically for instance, a child in
the first grade may comprehend stories by listening as well as the
average third grader can comprehend the same stories by reading. Thus,
the average first graders listening score can be said to indicate a
"reading potential" of the third grade level, because if the average
first grade child could instantly comprehend by reading as well as he
or  she can by listening, they would have a reading ability comparable
to a typical third graders reading ability. The reason parents are
encouraged to speak and read a lot to their pre-school children is to
develop their children's listening vocabulary and conceptual
comprehension and therefore their "reading potential" so that aftr
learning decoding they will comprehend the written language at the
higher level of their spoken language comprehension. Some research
suggests it may take typical children 6 to 8 years of schooling to
become as efficient and proficient at comprehending the written language
as they can the spoken language (see reference below). 

The concept of "reading potential" is important for adult literacy
educators for at least two reasons. First, whether people are designated
as "learning disabled" or not is frequently  based on the idea that on
some measure, such as an "intelligence" test, the people are at their
appropriate age level or above, but on a reading measure they are one,
two or more years behind. In other words, they are not reading "up to
their potential." 

Listening tests are one way of assessing people's "reading potential."
In fact, most individually administered intelligence or verbal IQ tests
present questions by speaking to the person being examined. The person
has to listen to receive the questions and explanations needed to
complete the test. Therefore, individual intelligence tests like the
Stanford-Binet, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, and Wechsler
intelligence scales for children and adults can be thought of largely as
listening tests. 

The second reason that the concept of "reading potential" is important
in adult literacy education is that it is frequently thought that adults
in need of literacy education have lived a reasonably long time and
developed fairly high levels of competence in oral language, including
vocabulary and comprehension ability for listening. Therefore, it is
assumed, unlike children, whose oral language skills are not well
developed yet and who must acquire higher levels of vocabulary while
also learning to read, adults will be able to acquire a fairly high
level of literacy in a brief time, relative to that required by
children.  This leads to the expectation that the adult's literacy
problems may be solved fairly quickly with a relatively brief period of
training in some form of decoding the written word to utilize the vast
amount of competence already possessed in the oral language.

However, when some 2,000 adults were assessed to compare their skills in
both listening and reading, the anticipated higher level of listening
ability, particularly at the lower levels of reading (down to the 2nd
grade) as indicated by the Gates-MacGinitie reading test, did not emerge
when listening to comprehend paragraphs. 

The data mentioned above  were obtained using group administered tests
in which the listening and reading measures were equated as closely as
possible in content, time to listen or read, and difficulty of the
questions, which were all multiple-choice requiring recall of factual
information.

The chapter by Sticht and James (1984) provides an extensive review of
listening and reading studies with adults. In one study, using the same
group test as used to obtain the data  given above,  an incarcerated
prison population of men reading at the 4th grade level showed about 1.5
grade levels of "potential."

Using a different group administered test of listening and reading
skills, the Durrell Listening and Reading Series tests, Sticht (1978)
reported that for 71 native speakers of English who were in an adult
literacy program their average reading level was at the 4.8 grade level,
while their reading "potential" was 6.0. Interestingly, for 45 adults
with English as a second language, their reading score was 4.8 while
their reading "potential" score was at the 4.4 grade level. In other
words, their listening skills were lower than their reading skills, so
when the listening score was converted to a reading "potential" score,
they performed below their actual reading level!

Using the Diagnostic Reading Scales, which are administered one-on-one
as an individual test, Sticht & Beck (1976) assessed the reading
"potential" of 42 native English speakers and 32 English as a second
language speakers in an adult literacy program. The native speakers had
an average reading level at the 6.2 grade level and a "potential" at the
grade 6.4 level. The non-native English speakers read at an average 4.3
grade level and had a "potential" at the 4.4 grade level.

Generally speaking, the studies cited suggest that adults with lower
levels of literacy tend to also have lower levels of oral language
(listening) comprehension when assessed using standardized tests (though
note the use of the word "tend" because this is not true of all adults).
This tends to be true for both vocabulary knowledge and the
comprehension of connected discourse. Of course, there can be important
exceptions to these general trend data. But as a rule, these data on
listening and reading suggest that adult literacy educators will have to
provide the least able adult readers (less than 4th grade abilities)
with  not only effective instruction in "phonemics", "phonics" and other
decoding knowledge, but also extensive opportunities for these adults to
develop lots of new vocabulary and content knowledge to improve both
their oral and written language comprehension abilities. This can take a
considerable amount of time.

Reference

Sources for all  of the studies cited above, and many others exploring
listening and reading skills of  adults, may be found in Thomas G.
Sticht & J.  H. James (1984). Listening and Reading. In R. Barr, M.
Kamil, and P. Mosenthal ( Eds.) Handbook of Reading Research. New York:
Longmans.
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