Reading comprehension and spoken language about multi-semiotic texts

This paper is based on findings following more than one hundred interviews with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students from remote, provincial and metropolitan areas about their strategies for reading multi-semiotic texts (texts containing both visual and verbal semiotic resources). These student groupings are being investigated because Aboriginal males in remote schools have lower mean scores on state-wide reading tests. The research is part of an Australian Research Council Linkage project, between the University of New England and the NSW Department of Education and Training, which aims to develop a model of 'image-language' relations. Strategies used by the students to answer questions about multi-semiotic texts appearing in the reading sections of the NSW 2005 Basic Skills Tests for Year 3 and Year 5 students have been analysed and then compared with the students' reading comprehension. Some students, who were unable to connect the visual and verbal meanings, experienced difficulty comprehending complex sentences used in the texts. It was also noted that many of these students' interview transcripts lacked complex syntactic (grammatical) structure. Academic or specialist written language often differs in both vocabulary and syntactic structure from vernacular or spoken language (Gee 2008:96) and may not resonate with or be able to bridge to a child's vernacular (Gee 2008:101). Much research has concerned the relationship between spoken vocabulary and reading comprehension but there has been little research into how oral syntactic structure (grammatical complexity) might relate to reading comprehension. To see if there is any relationship between these two factors, students' oral language was analysed to determine its level of complexity and then compared with their reading comprehension. Findings from correlations are presented together with a few examples from case studies.