Text comprehension and reading achievement in orally educated hearing‐impaired children

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Abstract
The results of two studies of the comprehension processes of good and poor readers within a severe to profoundly deaf orally educated population support a multiprocess model of reading comprehension in which both an individual's knowledge of text structures and knowledge of specific content areas play major roles. In Study 1, an investigation of oral text comprehension, a single complex story was employed and multiple models were used to predict differential text recall. In Study 2, an investigation of reading comprehension, text content and structure were manipulated across passages. In general, the results suggest that the older poor readers were not simply at an earlier stage of development with respect to reading comprehension skills. Although the hearing‐impaired children who were exhibiting difficulties in comprehending written texts were also exhibiting difficulties in comprehending similar texts when those texts were presented orally, all subjects tested at the same reading level did not exhibit the same qualitative results for the oral passage or the same levels of comprehension in their recalls of different textual materials. These results show that knowledge of an individual's tested reading level does not allow one to predict that individual's ability to acquire information from a particular text without taking into account those characteristics such as age and linguistic experience that can affect familiarity with both textual content and textual structure.