A Study of Vocabulary Knowledge, Listening Comprehension, and Verbal Concept Development in Students with Reading Disabilities = A Study of Vocabulary Knowledge, Listening Comprehension, and Verbal Concept Development in Students with Reading Disabilities

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study investigated the vocabulary knowledge, verbal concept development, and listening comprehension ability of children with reading disabilities. Seventeen students of 8 years old normally achieving, thirteen students of 8 years old with reading disabilities, twelve students of 10 years old normally achieving, ten students of 10 years old with reading disabilities participated in the study. Since standardized tests to measure school children` language ability had not been available by the time when this study begun, the Vocabulary subtest from K-WISC-III was used to examine participants` ability to define words to measure subject`s vocabulary knowledge. The Comprehension subtest and Similarities subtest from K-WISC-III was used as a measure of participants` verbal concept development ability. The Sentence Comprehension subtest from K-ABC was also used to measure students` listening comprehension ability. The design used in the present study was two factor between group design with learner classification(RD and NA) and grades difference(2nd grade vs 4th grade) serving as the one between group factor. Several separate two-way analyses of variances were conducted to examine differences in groups. The principal finding of this study is that although the mean of children with reading disabilities regarding the language measures are average range, they are around 1SD below the means of the matched comparison group in Vocabulary, Similarities, Comprehension subtests of K-WISC-III, Listening Sentence Comprehension subtest of K-ABC, and Verbal Scale scores of WISC-III.