Reading failure is not only an educational problem but also a public health threat. Beyond the hurdles of word recognition, young readers often struggle with understanding the texts (National Reading Panel). Comprehension monitoring is the metacognitive ability to monitor and adjust the reading process in the failure of comprehension. Beginning readers are often unaware of gaps and inconsistencies in their understanding, and therefore unable to benefit from comprehension strategy instructions as much as more experienced readers (National Reading Panel). To bootstrap comprehension monitoring, the present study tests the hypothesis that young readers are able to adjust reading processes implicitly in response to comprehension failures. In a series of eye-movement studies, 3rd-, 5th-grade students and adult readers will be asked to read age-appropriate stories that contain lexical, syntactic/semantic, and discourse anomalies. Current models of reading eye movements suggest that an automatic inhibition of the normal eye movement programming is among the first signs of metacognitive control of reading processes. Distributional analyses on fixation duration and saccade length will be used to determine the time course of comprehension monitoring among beginning readers. Additional studies will explore the limitation of the rudimentary monitoring process by asking young readers to follow explicit metacognitive strategies, such as re-reading and skipping irrelevant words. If a rudimentary comprehension monitoring ability can be successfully identified among beginning readers, along with its limitations, it will be one step closer to the long term goal of the research, which is to inform educational research on reading comprehension instruction among young readers. The threat of reading failures to public health is well recognized. By investigating reasons and potential remedies of reading comprehension failures among young readers, the present study addresses one of the central missions of the NICHD.
| Feng, Gary; Miller, Kevin; Shu, Hua et al. (2009) Orthography and the development of reading processes: an eye-movement study of Chinese and English. Child Dev 80:720-35 |
