The making of stronger readers: the role of syntactic proficiency in understanding texts

Beyond the first 3 or 4 years of schooling, benefit from education requires strong reading skills. Unfortunately, a substantial number of children struggle with comprehension of educational texts. International reading research and Danish practice have recognized the importance of supporting children’s acquisition of decoding skills and vocabulary. However, the role of syntactic proficiency has been largely overlooked despite evidence that school-aged children differ substantially in their ability to establish sentence meaning from word order.

The Making of Stronger Readers project involves a series of studies of how children’s reading comprehension depends on their syntactic proficiency, i.e. their ability to extract literal sentence meaning from word order. The aim of the studies is to investigate 1) the development of syntactic proficiency in the school years, 2) the mechanisms through which syntactic proficiency relates to reading comprehension, and 3) the effect of supporting syntactic proficiency through instruction.