Reading (1988) 22 (1) 0034-0472 $2.00

Do Young Readers Find Direct Speech Difficult to Read? Kay Lewis and Colin Harrison

Introduction

It has long been the practice to simplify the content of readers to be used in the early stages of reading. This custom has often led to criticisms of the resulting style. In 1908 Huey wrote that, next to the appearance of the primers, the most noticeable feature about three-quarters of them was ‘the inanity and disjointedness of their content’ (Huey, 1908: 279). He claimed that no attempt was made to ’write what the child would naturally say about the subject in hand’. Reid, writing in 1970, believed these criticisms were still valid (Reid, 1970: 25). In the Happy Venture Readers published in 1959, Schonell claimed to have ’controlled syntactical complexity on a developmental basis’ (Reid, 1970: 25). An example from page 5 of Book 2 of the series is given: ’“Dick, this seat by you is for Jack,” said mother.’ The vocabulary is indeed simple, with five of the words in the first 200 words of both the Fry and Dolch word lists. But as Reid points out, the unnaturalness of the passage suggests that word selection has been made at the lexical level only.

Some of the reading schemes published since then have attempted to overcome these criticisms. Writing children’s readers so that they are more closely related to children’s speech has been seen as an important consideration. According to Tatham, it is a ‘linguistically sound’ way of making use of the language the child brings with himlher to school (Tatham, 1970: 405). The Breakthrough to Literacy series published in 1970 made the grammatical construction of the texts of prime importance. Attempts were made to ensure that the language was closer to that of the children’s spoken language than is usual in children’s primers (Mackay et

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: Dr. C. Harrison, University of Nottingham, School of Education, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD.

52 Kay Lewis and Colin Harrison

al, 1970: 44). The stories were prepared from conversations with young children which were written down and later rewritten, retaining the features of the children’s spoken language, whilst at the same time conforming as closely as possible to standard English. This aim of ensuring that the reading matter is in language similar to that of the child is repeated in the Reading 360 series published in 1978. This is currently the best selling scheme in the United Kingdom. Here it is stressed both in Level 1 and Level 2 that the texts are ‘in ”natural” language’ (Reading 360,1978: 1, 2). The Bullock Report (D.E.S., 1975) found that in the first and second year junior classes reading schemes were still the most widely used method of teaching reading. Consequently, research which is able to shed some light on what causes difficulties in reading materials is of value.

In an attempt to avoid an unnatural style, many beginning reading courses make widespread use of direct speech. A cursory glance at many early reading books confirms that its use is very common. However, the implicit assumption that children find direct speech easy to read is open to question. The purpose of this study was to endeavour to discover whether children found texts written in direct speech easier to under- stand than those written in indirect speech. Among other ideas for experimental work with reading materials, Reid suggests that ‘the use of indirect speech, by far the most common mode of oral reporting, should be tried out. Again, it appears less ’simple’ than direct speech, but perhaps by a mistaken criterion’ (Reid, 1970: 34).

One of the differences between direct and indirect speech is the wider range of pronouns encountered in direct speech. In direct speech the reader is faced with first, second and third person pronouns, whereas in indirect speech they will normally only encounter the third person. Chapman (1979: 319) notes the frequency with which pronouns occur ‘particularly in children’s readers where direct speech is involved’, and in a study carried out by Phillips and Zinan (Chapman, 1981) pronouns were found to be the most common of all cohesive ties in early reading books.

When we read we expect that the identity of the person or thing being referred to will occur early in the text, but as the story progresses, pronouns will be substituted for the person or thing. However, pronouns only give the reader partial information. If the passage is to be fully understood it is necessary for the reader to retain in memory the antecedent to which the pronoun refers. Studies by Bormuth, Carr, Manning and Pearson (1970) and Lesgold (1974) examined anaphoric relationships and ranked these relationships in order of difficulty. Although these two studies tound a different hierarchy of difficulty they both found that there is a developmental component in the understanding of anaphora.

There has been considerable research in recent years on the ability of children to refer pronouns back to their referents, particularly by

Do Young Readers Find Direct Speech Difficult to Read 53

Chapman (1977, 1979, 1983). He found that children’s ability to perceive cohesive ties is an important feature in their comprehension of written text. If, as it appears, young children do experience difficulties with relating anaphoric pronouns back to their antecedents, it is possible that the wider range of pronouns which occurs in direct speech will cause additional problems, and it is with this problem that this study will be concerned.

The Development of a Pilot Test

Before finally deciding on how to examine children’s understanding of direct and indirect speech, some pilot testing was carried out. The tests were carried out on children from two combined classes of first and second year Juniors in a Nottinghamshire school. The school the children attend is in an economically depressed area (36% of the children have free school meals) and there were a number of children with reading abilities below those normally expected at this age level. Children who were rated by their class teachers as ‘very poor readers’ were excluded from the tests.

Initially, two versions of the same story were prepared in order to maximise the similarity of the story structure and vocabulary. The original text, which was written in direct speech, was rewritten in indirect speech. This posed a number of difficulties. First, some of the passages of direct speech were easier to rewrite than others. Secondly, some of the rewrites made the text appear quite different to the original. It was also almost impossible to find texts which could be rewritten and not sound very unnatural. To avoid the artificiality which necessarily resulted from this approach, it was decided to limit the tests to naturally occurring text.

A second possibility of using two distinctly separate texts-one written in direct speech and the other in indirect speech-was rejected due to the problems, or perhaps impossibility, of obtaining two comparable texts. Even had two passages of identical length and reading level in terms of a readability measure been found, there are many other features within a text which would have raised doubts about which particular features of those texts were being examined. Given these constraints, it was decided to use passages of direct and indirect speech taken from the same story.

The texts chosen were intended to be simple in nature, so that they would not pose too many difficulties for the reader. The decision for seeking simplicity was also due to the fact that for this pilot study one of the tests to be carried out was a form of cloze procedure. This kind of test was chosen for a number of reasons. When reading a passage aloud, the fact that the reader recognises the pronoun does not necessarily mean that the noun to which it refers has also been understood. To discover whether in fact children are able to keep in mind the referent of the

54 Kay Lewis and Colin Harrison

pronoun, a cloze-type test was prepared which deleted the pronoun. By then examining how adequately these omitted words were replaced by the reader we can gain some indication of the reader’s understanding of that passage. Research by Southgate et a1 (1981) showed that children often had a poor grasp of relationships within sentences. The deletion of particular types of words, in this instance pronouns, can give some insight into the readers’ understanding of this relationship. The use of cloze procedure in this way has been made in a number of studies by Chapman (1977, 1979, 1983).

The first passage chosen came from the story Mark Fox. This is one of a range of story books in the Young Shorty Book series written by James Webster, which is used in a number of schools in the U.K. This book has passages of a reasonable length in both direct and indirect speech. The text is also comparatively simple. When tested with the Rix Readability measure (Anderson, 1983) the reading difficulty was estimated as being equivalent to grade level 2 (i.e. second year infant).

The passage was 170 words long, and a total of twelve pronouns were omitted, six from direct speech and six from indirect speech. In all but one case there was a minimum of seven words between each deletion. The class teacher offered access to a group of six children of mixed ability. However, as stated earlier those with very poor reading skills were excluded. The children all had previous experience of cloze exercises and were asked to fill in the gaps with the most appropriate word. They were then left to complete the exercise and appeared to have no difficulty in understanding what was required.

Although the number of items is small it seems appropriate to present them in both mean and percentage form, since cloze scores are generally reported as percentages.

The results of this pilot exercise are given in Table 1. As can be seen from the table the students were more successful on the deleted items from indirect speech. Using a t test for dependent means the difference was statistically significant at the 0.02 level. Despite the small number of items and subjects, there seemed to be a clear indication that in this

Table 1. Number of Correct Answers in Cloze Test on Mark Fox passage

(n=6 students) Direct Speech Indirect Speech

mean(%) std. mean(%) std. deviation (%) deviation (YO)

3.83(64) 1.17(20) 5.0(83) 1.26(21) t=3.79 (significant at 0.02 level; two-tailed test, dependent means)

Do Young Readers Find Direct Speech Difficult to Read 55 passage at least direct speech was more difficult to understand than indirect speech.

The Development of the Referent Location Test

One of the limitations of this cloze-type test is that the correct replacement of the deleted word may not necessarily mean that the child has completely understood the relationship. As Bailey and Harrison (1984) point out, readers may have been able to insert the correct pronoun without the identity to which it referred being fully understood. To discover whether this is so a further test was devised. This test, to which we give the term referent location, requires the reader to ascertain the person or thing to which the pronoun refers. In this test, selected pronouns in a passage have a box drawn around them. The reader is instructed to draw a line from each of the pronouns to the person or thing to which it refers (see Figure 1).

Examples of how this was done were shown to the group as a whole. The passage used was the same as that used in the cloze exercise, only in this case every pronoun in the passage was boxed. There were a total of twenty-four pronouns in the complete passage-thirteen in direct speech and eleven in indirect speech. In order to balance the test, the first two pronouns in the passage were excluded from the examination so that eleven of each type were used. For this pilot administration of the referent-location test, nine children who had not taken part in the cloze experiment were chosen by the class teacher, again with very poor readers being excluded. Most of the children found the task difficult and needed constant reinforcement. The children were not given any answers and all help was limited to encouragement. All of the children finished the task. The results of the test are shown in Table 2.

Using the referent-location procedure, an even more marked difference between direct and indirect speech was indicated. The children made almost twice as many errors in identifying the referents of pronouns which were in the sections written in direct speech, and the difference between the means for the two sets of items was highly significant in statistical terms.

Figure 1 An example of the reference location task

"Get rid of that puppy,'' his Dad said, frowning. "We can't have a dog here." John was very " L e t m keep b he said.

56 Kay Lewis and Colin Harrison

Table 2. Responses to Referent Location Test on Mark Fox passage

(n=9 students) Direct Speech Indirect Speech

mean(%) std. mean(%) std. deviation(%) deviation (Yo)

3.89(35) 2.85(26) 7.22( 66) 2.81( 26) t =5.16 (significant at 0.001 level; two-tailed test, dependent means)

Both the cloze test and the referent-location test suggested that there were significant differences in how children understood the indirect and direct component of written text, at least in this particular passage. If we consider again the results of the deletion test we might conclude from the results shown in Table 1 that the passage was suitable for most of the children to work on at an independent level (see Harrison, 1980 for a discussion of the relationship between the per cent cloze scores and reading levels). For the remaining children it was appropriate at an instructional level. Given these results the findings of the referent- location test are somewhat surprising. One might have expected that children who were able to cope satisfactorily with a text would have identified pronominal referents more accurately. However, it must be remembered that different students did each of the tests. Although the two groups were meant to be of similar composition in terms of ability, the sample is too small for us to draw any firm conclusions. Only fifteen students were tested, six on the cloze exercise and nine on the referent location test.

Another possible reason for the relatively poor results on the referent- location test is that presenting children with an activity which involves referring as many as twenty-four pronouns back to their referents is a daunting task. For this reason a further test was undertaken which attempted to eliminate some of the problems experienced with this first test. In this case an extract from the book No Fighting No Biting! by Else Holmelund Minark was used. A passage by a different writer was used to avoid repeating the test using the same style of writing. With the Rix Readability measure (Anderson, 1983) this passage was estimated as being equivalent to a grade 3 level (i.e. first year junior). A different but parallel class from the same school was used. On this occasion it was decided to ask the children to first complete the cloze test and subsequently to complete the referent-location test. This was done in order to investigate more fully the relationship between cloze responses and the more specific information provided by the referent-location task. The cloze test was similar to that given previously, with twelve

Do Young Readers Find Direct Speech Difficult to Read 57

deletions, six from direct speech and six from indirect speech. There was a minimum of six words of continuous text between any two deleted words.

A referent-location test was also prepared, based on the same passage. The number of pronouns to be tested was limited to twelve, the same number as in the cloze exercise, with six in direct and six in indirect speech. The items in the referent location test were not in every case the same as those in the cloze test; because of problems noted in the pilot test when children were locating referents within a long passage, a shorter version of the story was used in the referent-location tests.

All the children had previous experience of cloze-type exercises, and therefore no special preparation was given for the deletion test. The deletion test was administered under untimed conditions. When all the children had completed this test they worked through the sample passage shown in Figure 1 in order to become familiar with the referent location procedure. They then took the referent-location test under untimed conditions. No child took longer than 30 minutes to complete either the cloze or the referent-location tests.

The results of the cloze test are shown in Table 3 and those for the referent location test in Table 4.

As can be seen from Table 3, there were an equal number of correct cloze responses in both sections, indicating that the level of difficulty for each was the same. However, as stated earlier, one of the limitations of the cloze exercise is that the correct replacement of the deleted word may not necessarily mean that the child has understood the relationship, and an examination of the results of Table 4 suggests that there may well have been a very different level of understanding than that indicated by the cloze scores.

As in the earlier pilot study, children were much more successful in identlfying correctly the referent of pronouns in indirect speech, and again using a t test for dependent means the different between scores on direct and indirect speech items was highly significant.

In view of the results from the Cloze exercise this result is somewhat surprising. Whereas the results for both the direct and indirect speech were the same for the cloze exercise, there is a clear indication in the referent-location test that the children found the passage in direct speech

Table 3. Cloze responses on No Fighting No Biting! passage

Direct Speech Indirect Speech mean(%) std. mean(%) std.

deviation (Yo) deviation(%) 3.76(63) 1.64(27) 3.76(63) 1.70(28)

58 Kay Lewis and Colin Harrison

Table 4. Referent location responses on No Fighting No Biting! passage

Direct Speech Indirect Speech

deviation (YO) deviation (YO) mean(%) std. mean(%) std. P

2.62(44) 2.01(33) 3.90(65) 1.92(32) <0.01 t =3.14 (dependent means)

more difficult. One possible explanation for the differences in the two tests is that the same pronouns were not used in both. Nevertheless, the trend is a clear one and would seem to merit further investigation.

At this stage it is not possible to say definitely what caused these discrepant results, but there zre some possible causes. If we look first at the cloze-type exercise it appears that pronouns which the author had used in the same sentence or immediately before were often inserted correctly. This supports the findings of Bailey and Harrison (1984) that cloze is a test of redundancy. An interesting exception occurred in the following deletion from the No Fighting No Biting! passage.

”. . . (they) could not do it, because they had eaten too many fish.”

Although the pronoun ’they’ is repeated in the same sentence 16 out of the 21 children failed to answer it correctly-the worst result of any individual item. Perhaps this was due to the fact that the deleted pronoun occurred before the non-deleted one, and hence the children did not make use of it.

An examination of the results of the referent-location task suggests that one problem which children face is the greater degree of changing referents which occurs in direct speech. In the indirect section of No Fighting No Biting! the first three pronouns tested were ’he’ and all referred to the ’Big Alligator’. The second three pronouns are all ’they’ and referred to the two small alligators, ’Light-foot and Quick-foot’. If we compare this to the section in direct speech we see that the first and third pronouns ’you’ and the fourth and sixth pronouns ‘we‘ refer to Light- foot and Quick-foot and the second pronoun ‘I’ and the fifth pronoun ’you’ refer to the Big Alligator. Not only are more pronouns used, but the same pronoun ‘you’ refers to different referents. ‘You’ seems to be the pronoun which causes the most problems, with less than seven of the children getting it correct each time. The following extract highlights these difficulties:

The big alligator said, “Well, well.

Do Young Readers Find Direct Speech Difficult to Read 59

Can’t climb over this time, can you? I will help you.” “We can’t talk to you,” said Light-foot and Quick-foot. “We have to run now.”

Another pronoun which caused greater difficulty was the first ’we’ and this could be due to the fact that it is cataphoric. Moe (1979: 19) has suggested that cataphoric ties require ’suspended judgment’ and should be used sparingly if comprehension is to be facilitated. The second use of ’we’ does not cause the same problems.

Perhaps one reason for the differing results between the cloze-type test and the referent-location test on this passage is the fact that some of the pronouns used in the two tests were different. In the cloze-type test five out of the six deleted pronouns in the direct speech referred to the Big Alligator. This reduced the occurrence of the changing referents which appeared to cause problems in the referent-location test. In further studies the same pronouns will be used in both types of tests.

There has been much research into the validity of cloze procedure, and as we have indicated, the referent-location task appears to expose some of its limitations. We fully accept that there are methodological and practical problems in using the referent-location procedure, but we feel that it is a relatively simple and illuminating test which merits further investigation. On the basis of these initial studies we feel justified in suggesting that they have provided evidence which indicates that many children do indeed have difficulty in interpreting direct speech, especially when that direct speech contains a variety of pronouns.

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