Pathways

Teaching Comprehension Research

Overview

Challenges to good reading comprehension

The Simple View of Reading provides a useful framework for understanding the challenges to good reading comprehension, and how they might differ at different points in development and for different children.

  1. Across development, the relative contributions of word reading and language comprehension change. In the early stages of reading development, children are still developing their basic word reading skills. As a result, word recognition skill is the major determinant of reading comprehension for beginner readers. As word reading becomes more accurate, efficient and fluent, language comprehension takes over as the principal predictor of reading comprehension.

    2. LARRC. (2015) ‘Learning to read: should we keep things simple?’ Reading Research Quarterly. 50, 2, pp. 151–169.

  2. Reading comprehension difficulties can arise for different reasons. Some children may have poor reading comprehension because their word reading is slow or inaccurate. Other children can develop good word reading skills, but experience problems with reading comprehension because of their weak language skills.

    3. Nation, K. and Norbury, C. F. (2005) ‘Why reading comprehension fails: Insights from developmental disorders’, Topics in language disorders, 25, pp. 21–32.

Children will not necessarily be progressing at the same rate in both these components of reading for a variety of reasons. Some specific children will have difficulties with word reading, even when they don’t have any difficulties in understanding language; others will have difficulties with language comprehension, even when they don’t find word reading difficult. Children learning English as an additional language can actually do very well on word reading. However, their knowledge of the meanings of words and, for some children who have recently arrived in the country, their limited cultural experience of life in the UK can restrict their background knowledge, affecting comprehension.

In the following sections, we consider the language skills that are associated with comprehension success and failure, and also the memory resources that support comprehension processes.