TY - JOUR
T1 - Factors that influence comprehension of connectives among language minority children from Spanish-speaking backgrounds
AU - Crosson, Amy C.
AU - Lesaux, Nonie K.
AU - Martiniello, Maria
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by National Institute for Child Health and Human Development Grant 1 R03 HD049674-01 awarded to Nonie K. Lesaux. Some of these findings were presented at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (San Francisco, CA). The authors thank Catherine Snow, Margaret McKeown, and William E. Nagy for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper and Carol Barry, Debbie Beldock, and Carol Osborne for their support of this project. Finally, special thanks to the principals, teachers, and students who participated in this study.
PY - 2008/10
Y1 - 2008/10
N2 - This study explores factors influencing the degree to which language minority (LM) children from Spanish-dominant homes understand how connectives, such as in contrast and because, signal relationships between text propositions. Standardized tasks of vocabulary, listening comprehension, word reading, and a researcher-designed text cohesion task were administered to 90 fourth-grade LM students. Understanding of connectives was influenced by vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension. The degree of challenge that specific connectives posed to LM students was predicted by the difficulty that connectives presented as vocabulary items and also by the type of semantic relationship between clauses they signaled. The findings point to factors that may present sources of difficulty underlying reading comprehension, in particular the critical role of oral language competencies.
AB - This study explores factors influencing the degree to which language minority (LM) children from Spanish-dominant homes understand how connectives, such as in contrast and because, signal relationships between text propositions. Standardized tasks of vocabulary, listening comprehension, word reading, and a researcher-designed text cohesion task were administered to 90 fourth-grade LM students. Understanding of connectives was influenced by vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension. The degree of challenge that specific connectives posed to LM students was predicted by the difficulty that connectives presented as vocabulary items and also by the type of semantic relationship between clauses they signaled. The findings point to factors that may present sources of difficulty underlying reading comprehension, in particular the critical role of oral language competencies.
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U2 - 10.1017/S0142716408080260
DO - 10.1017/S0142716408080260
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:52449132621
SN - 0142-7164
VL - 29
SP - 603
EP - 625
JO - Applied Psycholinguistics
JF - Applied Psycholinguistics
IS - 4
ER -