Activity and Imagined Activity Can Enhance Young Children's Reading Comprehension.

Abstract

The Indexical Hypothesis suggests a new method for enhancing children's reading comprehension. Young readers may not consistently "index," or map, words to the objects the words represent. Consequently, these readers fail to derive much meaning from the text. The instructional method involves manipulating toy objects referred to in the text (e.g., a barn, a tractor, a horse, in a text about a farm) to simulate the actions described in the text. Correctly manipulating the objects forces indexing and facilitates the derivation of meaning. Both actual manipulation and imagined manipulation resulted in markedly better (compared with rereading) memory for and comprehension of the text material, thereby lending strong support to the Indexical Hypothesis. Can young children's reading comprehension be enhanced? Are there potent reading-comprehension strategies that can be identi- fied and prescribed (see, e.g., Ehri, Nunes, Stahl, & Willows, 2001; Symons, McGoldrick, Snyder, & Pressley, 1990)? The In- dexical Hypothesis (Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002; Glenberg & Rob- ertson, 2000; Kaschak & Glenberg, 2000) suggests a new sort of answer to these old questions. Because children may not consis- tently index, or map, written words to the objects the words represent, even when the words are pronounced, these children fail to derive meaning from the text. Consequently, reading becomes an unengaging exercise in word calling. If, as we hypothesize, early young readers' performance can be enhanced by increased indexing, then the following instructional intervention is sug- gested: While children read texts about events taking place in a particular scenario (e.g., on a farm), objects referred to in the text (e.g., a toy barn, tractor, and horse) are made available, and the children are asked to manipulate those objects to simulate the content of the sentences. Such manipulation should force indexing, thereby facilitating the children's derivation of meaning. We begin by reviewing the Indexical Hypothesis and some of the research that supports it. The review includes a description of three precedents suggesting that manipulation of objects being read about should enhance children's reading comprehension.1 We then present three experiments conducted with first- and second- grade readers. These experiments demonstrate large (e.g., 50% and more) positive effects of manipulation on children's recall and application of the material just read. In addition, in Experiment 3, children are trained to imagine manipulating the toys rather than actually manipulating them. This imagined manipulation produces a modest degree of transfer (i.e., strategy maintenance in the absence of instructions). Finally, we contrast the explanation of poor reading comprehension provided by the Indexical Hypothesis with several other accounts based on fluency, inference making, and integration.