Beyond reading comprehension: exploring the additional contribution of Core Academic Language Skills to early adolescents’ written summaries

Abstract

To assess text comprehension and concept mastery, standards-aligned measures have moved from using multiple-choice questions to using source-based writing tasks (sometimes referred to as Reading-to-Write tasks). For example, it is now common for students to be asked to read a text and then to produce a written response, often a summary or argumentative essay. While this task involves comprehension of the source text, it remains unclear the degree to which these reading-to-write tasks also tap additional skills, such as academic language proficiency, which may support or hamper the writer’s ability to convey information acquired from reading. Given the lack of research focused on this question, in this study, we examined whether variability in early adolescents’ Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) contributes to the quality of their written summaries of science source texts. A total of 259 participants in grades four to eight were administered the Core Academic Language Skills Instrument (CALS-I) and the Global Integrated Scenario-Based Assessment (GISA), which included a reading comprehension test and a summary writing task, both based on the same scientific source text. Findings revealed that CALS, previously shown to be associated with reading comprehension, have a robust positive relation with early adolescents’ science summary writing quality, predicting unique variance over and above students’ source text comprehension and demographic characteristics. Results highlight the relevance of paying instructional attention not only to content but also to language skills when preparing students to become independent learners in a content area. In addition, these findings offer some evidence for CALS as a cross-modality construct relevant to both reading and writing at school.