Monitoring and regulation in reading comprehension among Chinese children : exploring the role of comprehension monitoring, lexical ambiguity resolution and reading strategy

Abstract

Reading comprehension, a process of extracting and constructing meaning from text, is important in learning. Prior research has been exploring the underlying cognitive-linguistic skills associated with reading comprehension and sources of reading comprehension failure. One of the factors that has recently gained wide attention in reading research in Western alphabetic languages is monitoring and regulation in reading, which has been considered as a higher-level or metacognitive process in reading that influences reading comprehension beyond decoding and/or language comprehension. The purpose of the present work is to better understand the role of monitoring and regulation in children’s reading comprehension, focusing mainly on three aspects of monitoring and regulation that are important to word-to-text and text level integration in Chinese reading comprehension: comprehension monitoring, lexical ambiguity resolution and reading strategy. Study 1 examined the developmental contribution of comprehension monitoring to reading comprehension cross-sectionally across grade 1 to grade 3 children and longitudinally by following the grade 1 participants for a year. The role of comprehension monitoring in atypical readers was also investigated. The regression-based path analyses revealed that comprehension monitoring was a significant predictor of children’s reading comprehension above and beyond decoding- and language comprehension-related skills concurrently starting from grade 2 and longitudinally from grade 1. By comparing profiles of poor decoders, poor comprehenders with adequate word recognition ability and typical readers, comprehension monitoring was found to be a unique weakness in poor comprehenders. The findings suggested that comprehension monitoring played an important role in early reading development. To further understand the role of monitoring and regulation in different reading processes, Study 2 investigated the monitoring and regulation of lexical ambiguity with ambiguous character strings in Chinese sentences by examining children’s eye-movements with an experimental design. The results showed that sensitivity to lexical ambiguity moderated the relationship between word recognition and reading comprehension. Furthermore, comprehension monitoring influenced the comprehension of sentences containing lexical ambiguity which was partially mediated by regulatory eye-movement transitions indicative of the use of comprehension-repair strategy. The findings demonstrated the importance of monitoring and regulation in word-to-text integration. Study 3 explored children’s reading strategy and its association with reading comprehension by tracking children’s eye-movement. Eye Movement analysis with Hidden Markov Model (EMHMM) with co-clustering was used to cluster children’s eye-movement patterns into two strategy groups. Children who adopted a more flexible reading strategy performed better in reading comprehension and reading-related skills. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that children’s reading strategy explained additional variance in reading comprehension above and beyond decoding- and language comprehension-related skills and comprehension monitoring. Overall, the current research showed that monitoring and regulation plays a critical role in children’s reading comprehension and its development beyond decoding- and/or language comprehension-related skills in Chinese. The present findings inform theoretical and educational implications for including aspects of monitoring and regulation in learning instructions, and in the development of effective identification of and intervention for Chinese children with reading comprehension difficulties.