Comprehension of Connectives: Development Across Primary School Age and Influencing Factors.

Anna Volodina,Sabine Weinert

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00814

Abstract

Language development is not completed when children enter primary school. As the comprehension of connectives (such as although, despite) is important for understanding and producing academic texts and, thus, relevant for school success, we investigated its development and influencing factors across primary school age on the basis of a newly developed and validated test instrument. Using a German sample of 627 students (n = 361 language minority learners) in primary school, results of growth curve models showed students’ initial level of the comprehension of connectives to be negatively related to its growth rate. Additional analyses revealed this association to be mainly due to parental socioeconomic status (SES) rather than students’ language background. In particular, parental SES and students’ receptive grammar impacted initial level as well as growth rate of connective comprehension. Our results point to the necessity of a continuous and early sensitization for the register of academic language especially in the group of students from a low socioeconomic background.

Highlights

Language development further progresses after preschool age (Karmiloff-Smith, 1986, 1992), with learners expanding their proficiencies in vocabulary, grammar, and discourse through adolescence and potentially through their entire life as they move through a range of social contexts (Berman and Ravid, 2009)
In Grades 2 and 3, this only held for language minority learners (p < 0.05), whereas no difference in difficulty was observed in the group of monolingual German students
Connectives are an important facet of academic language which has been suggested to be highly relevant to school success (e.g., Schleppegrell, 2004; Barr et al, 2019)

Summary

Introduction

Language development further progresses after preschool age (Karmiloff-Smith, 1986, 1992), with learners expanding their proficiencies in vocabulary, grammar, and discourse through adolescence and potentially through their entire life as they move through a range of social contexts (Berman and Ravid, 2009). The knowledge of connectives is associated with text comprehension (e.g., Crosson and Lesaux, 2013b; Duggleby et al, 2015; Kohnen and Retelsdorf, 2019), whereas the productive use of connectives is related to more complex argumentation in academic texts (Schmalhofer et al, 2002; Taylor et al, 2019). 10–11) defines being academically proficient as “knowing and being able to use general and content-specific vocabulary, specialized or complex grammatical structures, and multifarious language functions and discourse structures – all for the purpose of acquiring new knowledge and skills, interacting about a topic, or imparting information to others.” Bailey (2007, pp. 10–11) defines being academically proficient as “knowing and being able to use general and content-specific vocabulary, specialized or complex grammatical structures, and multifarious language functions and discourse structures – all for the purpose of acquiring new knowledge and skills, interacting about a topic, or imparting information to others.”

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion