Reading comprehension and receptive vocabulary in Elementary School students with typical development

Abstract

Purpose: Prepare an instrument to evaluate reading comprehension and verify the influence of receptive vocabulary on the reading comprehension of 3rd to 5th-grade Elementary School students with typical development. Methods: All ethical precepts were accomplished. Study participants were 69 3rd-, 4th- and 5th-grade students (35 girls) with mean ages of 8.2, 9.2, and 10 years, respectively, with typical development in the School Performance Test. Half of the sample underwent the reading comprehension test using the question-and-answer method and the other half took the test using the Cloze technique. All students completed the Teste de Vocabulário por Figuras USP (TVFUSP) with 139 stimuli. Results: The schoolchildren presented good performance in receptive vocabulary despite their low socioeconomic level. Better performance was observed in explicit questions compared with that in implicit questions. Students demonstrated more homogeneous and similar performance between the school years in the Cloze technique. No conclusive results were found regarding the correlation between receptive vocabulary and reading comprehension by the two methods. Conclusion: There is evidence of the influence of receptive vocabulary on the reading comprehension of texts, mainly in the question-and-answer method. The prepared instrument, including both assessment methods of reading comprehension, is efficient to investigate and characterize the reading comprehension of 3rd to 5th-grade Elementary School students, and both methods significantly differentiated students in the 3rd and 5th grades.