Teaching Third-Grade Students to Comprehend Anaphoric Relationships: The Application of a Direct Instruction Model

THIS STUDY investigated the effectiveness of a direct instruction model for teaching children to comprehend anaphoric relationships. Fifty-nine third-grade children were assigned randomly to one of three treatments: a strategy group, in which subjects received intensive, systematic instruction in anaphora resolution according to a direct instruction model; a basal group, in which subjects were administered a series of lessons on word referents from a current basal reader program; and a control group, in which subjects received no added instruction on anaphora and simply participated in normal classroom language arts instruction. Several immediate and delayed posttests revealed that students in the strategy group consistently outperformed students in both the basal group and the control group in ability (a) to find the antecedent for the anaphoric term in short, contrived passages, (b) to find the antecedent for the anaphoric term in longer, more ecologically valid narrative and expository passages selected from basal readers, and (c) to answer anaphora-specific wh questions about narrative and expository selections in basal readers. These results were interpreted as further support for the efficacy of a direct instructional model for teaching children reading comprehension skills.