Abstract
The simple view of reading proposes that the development of reading comprehension in early elementary school is best predicted by children’s fluent decoding and oral language skills. Recent studies challenge this view and suggest that executive functions should also be included in this theoretical model; however, the empirical evidence is not strong enough to clearly support or refute this hypothesis. In this short-term longitudinal study, we used latent variables to test whether executive functions have direct effects on the development of reading comprehension in 184 Romanian second graders, beyond fluent decoding and oral language skills. The results indicated that the initial stages of reading comprehension were associated with executive functions, but only the language skills could independently predict the development of reading comprehension. Our findings show that executive functions do not have a significant direct effect on the development of reading comprehension in early readers beyond fluent decoding and oral language skills in languages with transparent orthography. The results also suggest that once children learn to decode well, their language skills (and not their executive functions) have a strong effect on the development of reading comprehension. Therefore, reading interventions in elementary school should stress on the development of oral language skills.
Highlights
Learning to read is a crucial milestone in a child’s development
The aim of this study was to test whether the executive functions can explain the development of reading comprehension beyond the effects of fluent decoding and oral language skills
Our results showed that even a rigorously measured executive functions construct could not explain the development of reading comprehension of early readers in a language with transparent orthography beyond the theoretical framework of the simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986)
Summary
Learning to read is a crucial milestone in a child’s development. The purpose of learning to read is to comprehend the written text. Two recent long-term longitudinal studies showed that fluent decoding and language skills together with the effects of their interactions explain almost all of the variance (> 96%) in early stages of the development of reading comprehension, with language skills playing a crucial role in both early and later stages (Hjetland, Lervåg, Lyster, Hagtvet, & Melby-Lervåg, 2018; Lervåg, et al, 2017). An increasing number of recent studies challenges this view by suggesting the existence of a third predictor of reading comprehension which might have effects above and beyond fluent decoding and oral language skills (Cirino et al, 2019; Follmer, 2018; Guajardo, & Cartwright, 2016; Liu, Sun, Li, Yeung, & Wong, 2018) This predictor is executive functions, a set of top-down cognitive abilities that control thoughts and behaviors (Miyake et al, 2000). Planning is suggested to contribute to reading comprehension by enacting strategies used by readers both before and during reading, including monitoring and revising the text (Cutting, Materek, Cole, Levine, & Mahone, 2009; Sesma, Mahone, Levine, Eason, & Cutting, 2009)
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