The Relationship of Reading Comprehension to Written Production of Transformationally

s. No studies have investigated whether the writing of certain transformations can predict comprehension of prose written in them. In studying this possibility, 90 subjects, 30 from each grade level, were asked to read three major prose forms, each written in three transformed versions, and to Reprints may be requested from Ronald V. Evans, University of West Florida, Pensacola, Florida. by guest on November 4, 2016 jlr.sagepub.com Downloaded from 296 Journal of Reading Behavior DC, 3 respond to each immediately on Cloze tests. Every subject also rewrote a simple sentence paragraph using his own sentence combining techniques. The Cloze test scores were then compared to sentence-lengthening criteria in a multiple regression analysis. Cloze tests did not satisfactorily predict sentence length. Yet there was strong evidence to suggest that Cloze tests are less valid measures of advanced reading comprehension and that the higher Cloze scores predicted lower sentence-lengthening criteria. Research over the past ten years has shown with great precision the ways in which specific syntactic structures affect reading comprehension and recall. Still other parallel research has produced inventories of the specific syntactic structures generally used by students from elementary school through college. Little investigation, however, has been carried on to find what relationship, if any, exists between the reading and writing of various syntactic structures through the twelve grades of public school and on into the four years of higher public education. This study is intended to examine the relationship between structures students write and those they comprehend in reading and, second, to determine whether or not this relationship offers insight into the transitional process between word-by-word reading and chunking. It was hypothesized that there would be no predictive relationship between the comprehension and production of syntactic transformations in the reading and writing of 8th and 12 graders and University Seniors. Eighth graders were expected to score lower on Cloze tests based on prose containing more transformations than they used in their writing and that they would use fewer transformations than either the 12th graders or University Seniors in their writing. It was also expected that 12th graders would be similarly lower in Cloze scores and transformational indices than University Seniors. Of secondary concern were two further indices: First, the gradual increase of syntactic transformations used in writing would in some way be predictive of the "chunldng" process used by readers in their progression beyond word-by-word method. Second, the Cloze test procedure may not be valid for measuring. th e reading comprehension of subjects whose written transformations shows they are "chunking" information into much larger than single-word units, suggesting they may be doing the same chunking in reading.