Pathways

What are some of the challenges to good reading comprehension?

Specific difficulties with reading comprehension can arise for different reasons, and these can vary from child to child.

When children first learn to read, they are still developing their basic word reading skills. As a result, their skill in word recognition is the major determinant of how good they are at reading comprehension. As their word reading becomes more fluent, their language comprehension becomes the key factor in reading comprehension.

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 reading comprehension problems because of less-developed language skills. Children learning English as an additional language can actually do very well on word reading. However, their knowledge of the meanings of words and idioms 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 their comprehension.