Child Language Disorder

Child Language Disorders

Title: Readability Case Study and Scenarios

Reference: Gail Portnuff Venable, MS. "Readability Case Study and Scenarios." Topics in

Language Disorders 23 (2003): 248-51

Summary: Li Moon, a resource specialist in the Hillsborough City School District in Northern California has completed a study about the use of readability measurement. The surrounding school districts (Hillsborough City School District, Millbrae Elementary School District, and San Bruno Park Elementary District) are using oral reading to enhance students literacy. These schools are using the Open court Reading series in order achieve this goal. The teachers were given many short reading passages at each grade level and the students would then read the passages aloud and the teachers would then monitor the students' progress throughout the year.

The program was doing well to improve student literacy, until there became a problem with the fluency monitoring. The teachers would administer the prompts to the children in three different levels. They would collect their data on the students by recording the number of words read correctly per minute. The scores seemed to improve at all levels in the first through fourth grade and at the first and second level of fifth grade during the first year. But, at the third level of the fifth graders the scores took a huge drop. The scores continued to drop the following year at the same level as well. The teachers reported their problem and the passage at the fifth grade level was more difficult than the passage of the sixth grade level. When the passage was later analyzed, it was placed at the 9th and 10th grade level. The committee examined all the prompts and assessed the readability levels of all the passages. They chose two prompts for each grade level and devised a protocol whereby the teachers will use the same prompts at each of three points during the year. The teachers will give the difficult prompt first and if the student scores in the 50th percentile, the student will not require any further testing. The student's success with a reading will depend on the difficulty of the text and the students background knowledge and own interests.

"The hope of this study is that it will better serve to signal the progress of individual students, some of whom have language learning difficulties."

When this occurs, it will be important for the teacher to investigate the students' errors and determine the appropriate grade level for fluency practice.

"In the April 15, 2003 issue of The ASHA Leader( pp. 5,6), Alan Kamhi stated:

It is no longer sufficient for SLPs to focus solely on early literacy skills and phoneme awareness. SLPs need to embrace a more comprehensive approach to literacy that involves becoming knowledgeable about all aspects of reading, including reading fluency, which has been described as the most neglected reading skill."

The article continues on by talking about writing readable materials for a speech and language clinic. The question is brought up

" A speech and language clinic wants to create a language checklist for parents of children with suspected language and reading problems. Many of the parents for whom the checklist is intended have limited English skills and some have reading difficulties. How can the clinic produce clear, comprehensible instruction for this population?"

Chall and Dale and Edward Fry are the developers of two of the most widely used readability formulas. They suggest that readability