Relative Clauses in Reading Schemes: How does Children’s Comprehension Align?

This project investigates the extent to which the Oxford Reading Levels Scheme reflects children’s grammatical comprehension with regard to relative clauses. Two key factors are considered: embeddedness and focus. The project adopts two methodologies. Firstly, 40 reading scheme books are analysed, and any relative clauses are coded for embeddedness and focus. This demonstrates that the reading scheme is increasing complexity with level, signified by a higher number of relative clauses, and a greater diversity of them at higher levels. Secondly, an experimental study is conducted with 25 five- and six-yearold participants, in which they are provided with a sentence including a relative clause, and are asked to indicate which of three images matches the sentence. The relative clauses are manipulated according to their embeddedness and focus, to observe if these factors result in differences in comprehension. It is concluded that children comprehend object-embedded, subject focus (OS) relative clauses most easily, followed by subject-embedded, subject focus (SS), object-embedded, object focus (OO) and subject-embedded, object focus (SO). Collectively, these findings indicate that the use of OS and OO relative clauses in the scheme is reflective of children’s comprehension, but further integration of SS and SO clauses may benefit children’s comprehension abilities. This research is significant for children who have limited exposure to reading outside of school, to aid their grammatical development.