The relationship between meta-linguistic awareness and reading comprehension among fifth and sixth graders

النوع : Mémoire

While it is accepted that meta-linguistic awareness plays a major role in decoding (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000), not much is known about the role that meta-linguistic awareness plays in reading comprehension. In this study, ambiguous sentences (deep structural ambiguities, surface structure ambiguities and lexical ambiguities) are used to examine the relationship between meta-linguistic awareness and reading comprehension.-- Fifty six fifth and sixth graders were tested on 40 ambiguous sentences and 22 structural riddles. Their performance was correlated with scores on the reading comprehension test, which is a component of their language arts program, in order to determine the relationship between meta-linguistic awareness and reading comprehension. Furthermore, a stepwise multiple regression analysis was conducted in order to determine the role of meta-linguistic awareness in reading comprehension. Participants' scores on deep structural ambiguities, surface structure ambiguities and lexical ambiguities were used as predictor variables and the score on reading comprehension were used as a dependent variable.--The results indicated that a positive relationship between both variables exists. In fact the riddle task was significantly correlated with reading comprehension, as assessed by the Houghton Mifflin Reading Comprehension Test, in both grades 5 and 6. Although the sentence ambiguity task was significantly correlated with reading comprehension in grade 5, no correlation between the two variables was found in grade 6. Although the results in grade 6 do not reveal a positive correlation between the sentence ambiguity task and the reading comprehension task, the findings depict a significant correlation between the riddle task and the reading comprehension task. A stepwise multiple regression analysis determined that riddle solving and ambiguous sentence detection accounted for 41% of the variance in reading comprehension achievement. However, further examination of the results revealed that riddle ambiguity solving was the only predictor of reading comprehension achievements in this sample. Sentence ambiguity was excluded from the model.