Language comprehension in adults with low literacy skills: Comparing performance, preference, self-evaluation and state anxiety in oral and written text comprehension tasks

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Irit Bar-Kochva, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 512028503

Significant deficits in reading comprehension, despite the completion of compulsory education, are evident in a large proportion of the population worldwide. According to the Simple View of Reading (SVR), the variance in reading comprehension can be explained to a large extent by decoding/word reading skills and by oral language comprehension. While the SVR has been extensively studied mainly in children, its relevance to adults with low literacy skills has been examined only in the last decade in a number of studies - but only in readers of English. These studies indicate that reading comprehension of these adults is explained mainly by decoding/word reading. However, the irregular nature of the spelling-sound relations in English may stress the contribution of decoding/word reading within the model. One goal of the present study is therefore to examine the pattern of relations between the components of the SVR model and reading comprehension in adults with low literacy skills who read a relatively transparent orthography, such as the German one. While data has been accumulated to indicate significant deficits in decoding and word reading in adults with low literacy skills (mainly based on studies of readers of English), the data on their oral language skills are scarcer, and provide somewhat mixed results. A second goal of the study is then to characterize the performance level of these adults in the two components of the SVR, and mainly in the language comprehension component. Performance in some of the more basic oral language skills will also be explored (including vocabulary, syntactic processing and phonological working memory). Going beyond theoretical aspects in trying to understand the components of reading comprehension in struggling adult readers, the assistive technology of text-to-speech, which offers an automatic read aloud function while texts are visually presented, is by now widely available in digital formats. It is unclear, however, whether adults with low literacy skills understand texts better when they are auditorily presented to them compared to a written presentation condition, and whether a combined form of presentation (visual and auditory) offers any advantage. The subjective experience of the adults in focus while processing texts under these presentation conditions has also not been studied before. A third goal of this study is to understand whether these adults present different levels of text comprehension when texts are presented visually, auditorily or in a combined condition, and to examine their subjective experience while processing texts under these conditions (in terms of preference, self-evaluation of performance and state-anxiety level).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants