Reading Comprehension Difficulties

British Journal of Educational Psychology, 2006

Background. Children with fluent and accurate word reading in the presence of poor text comprehension are impaired on a wide range of reading-related tasks. Aims. This study investigated the consistency of skill impairment in a sample of poor comprehenders to identify any fundamental skill weakness that (i) might be associated with poor text comprehension, and (ii) might lead to depressed reading development. An additional aim was to determine whether reading comprehension difficulties are associated with more general educational difficulties. Sample. Twenty-three poor comprehenders and 23 good comprehenders with ageappropriate word reading accuracy were assessed when aged 8 years. Concurrent reading and language performance and reading, educational attainment and reasoning skills 3 years later are reported. Methods. The following skills were assessed when aged 8 years: word reading, text comprehension, vocabulary, syntax, cognitive ability, working memory, comprehension subskills. Listening comprehension, SAT scores and reasoning scores at 11 years are also reported. Results. There was no evidence for any fundamental skill weaknesses in the population of poor comprehenders at Time 1. However, poor vocabulary skills led to impaired growth in word reading ability and poor general cognitive ability led to impaired growth in comprehension. Poor comprehenders obtained lower SAT scores than did the good comprehenders at 11 years. Conclusions. These findings indicate that a single underlying source of poor comprehension is unlikely. Poor comprehenders are at risk of generally poor educational attainment, although weak verbal or cognitive skills appear to affect the reading development of poor comprehenders in different ways. Text comprehension draws on many different language skills. These include lower-level lexical skills such as word reading efficiency and vocabulary knowledge, sentence-level

Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 2015

This study explores the incidence of poor comprehenders, that is, children identified as having reading comprehension difficulties, despite age-appropriate word reading skills. It supports the findings that some children do show poor reading comprehension, despite age-appropriate word reading, as measured with a phonological coding test. However, the proportion of poor comprehenders was smaller than the frequently reported 10–15%, and smaller yet, when average sight word recognition, measured with an orthographic coding test, was also set as a criterion for word reading skill. Compared to average comprehenders, the poor comprehenders’ orthographic coding and daily reading of literary texts were significantly below those of average readers. This study indicates that a lack of reading experience, and likewise, a lack of fluent word reading, may be important factors in understanding 9-year-old poor comprehenders’ difficulties.

Language and word decoding skill along with cognitive processes underlying reading comprehension difficulties of children were investigated by means of two different studies. In study1, good and poor comprehenders of Grade V of some Odia medium schools of Cuttack, Odisha matched for age and intelligence (measured by RCPM) but differing with respect to their reading comprehension skill were examined for their proficiency in word decoding and PASS (Planning -Attention -Simultaneous -Successive) processes in which the poor comprehenders were deficient. Both the reading skills also showed significant relationship with each of the four PASS processes. In study 2, on the other hand, good and poor comprehenders of Grade IV of some English medium schools of Cuttack, Odisha matched for their age and overall intellectual functioning in terms of PASS processes (measured by CAS) were studied further for their proficiency in word decoding and each of the four PASS processes separately. Poor comprehenders were found deficient not only in word decoding, but also in simultaneous processing while their competence in the remaining three processes was absolutely normal. Both the reading skills also showed significant relationship with the simultaneous process. The results have been discussed in terms of proficiency in the requisite linguistic skills along with competence in the cognitive processes that ensures successful accomplishment of the tasks at hand and suggestions have been made for possible remediation of the problems in that direction.

BBN report; no. 3593, 1977

Skilled reading depends upon a,m ltiplicity of perceptual, linguistic, and cognitive processeslk nadequate development of o'e or more of these processes say in turn lead to reading difficulty.` This report considers some cf the processes that say be especially problematic for the young reader. After an overview in which skilled reading is described as the product of both analytic and synthetic, or bottom-up and top-down, activities, potential sources of difficulty are discussed under three general headings:ẁ ord recognition, syntactic processing, and semantic processing.

Learning and Individual Differences, 2016

We wish to thank the staff, students and parents at the participating school and Marielle Smith, Cornelia van Werkum, Kate Ross and Elissa Greco for their assistance with test scoring. We also wish to thank Kate Cain and Janice Keenan for their comments on the original draft of this paper, which appeared in the first author's doctoral thesis, and Max Coltheart and Anne Castles for comments and suggestions relating to theoretical differences between Dual Route and PDP models of reading aloud.

Learning Disabilities Research & Practice, 2014

Our aim in the present paper is to discuss a "cognitive view" of reading comprehension, with particular attention to research findings that have the potential to improve our understanding of difficulties in reading comprehension. We provide an overview of how specific sources of difficulties in inference making, executive functions, and attention allocation influence reading comprehension processes and outcomes and may lead to reading comprehension problems. Finally, we discuss how the consideration of these potential sources of difficulty have practical implications for the design and selection of instructional materials. and holds faculty appointments in the Department of Education and Child Studies at Leiden University and in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on the cognitive and neurological processes involved in reading comprehension in children and adults, and on the development of instructional methods for proficient and struggling readers.

Scientific Studies of Reading, 1998

The purpose of this study was to compare rauding theory to our own evolving model of reading acquisition, which supports stage and phase theories of reading development. The relations among rauding variables--cognitive power, auditory-accuracy level, word-recognition level, comprehension-accuracy level, reading-rate level, and reading-comprehension-rate level-were examined using structural equation modeling. The Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children and the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement subtests were used to operationalize the various constructs. Carver's (1993) model was assessed at each grade in two parts, with overlapping paths allowing cross-validation of some coefficients.

Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2010

Background: Poor comprehenders have difficulty comprehending connected text, despite having ageappropriate levels of reading accuracy and fluency. We used a longitudinal design to examine earlier reading and language skills in children identified as poor comprehenders in mid-childhood. Method: Two hundred and forty-two children began the study at age 5. Further assessments of language and reading skill were made at 5.5, 6, 7 and 8 years. At age 8, fifteen children met criteria for being a poor comprehender and were compared to 15 control children both concurrently and prospectively. Results: Poor comprehenders showed normal reading accuracy and fluency at all ages. Reading comprehension was poor at each time point and, notably, showed minimal increases in raw score between 6 and 8 years. Phonological skills were generally normal throughout, but mild impairments in expressive and receptive language, listening comprehension and grammatical understanding were seen at all ages. Conclusions: Children identified as poor comprehenders at 8 years showed the same reading profile throughout earlier development. Their difficulties with the non-phonological aspects of oral language were present at school entry and persisted through childhood, showing that the oral language weaknesses seen in poor comprehenders in mid-childhood are not a simple consequence of their reading comprehension impairment.

Journal of research and development in education, 1991

A study explored word recognition and structural features of words as determinants of reading comprehension. Word recognition scores and comprehension scores for three age groups (6-7 years, 8-9 years, and 10-12 years) representing 1,200 children were used to examine the relationships of structural features of the word recognition task to comprehension performance. Results indicated that the relationship between word recognition and comprehension remained high at all three age levels, dropping only slightly for the oldest children. Results also indicated that the capability to predict comprehension from structural features of the recognized words dropped dramatically for the older children. Findings support a model with the following characteristics: (1) word recognition for younger children is understandable in terms of a small number of structural features of words, which themselves are predictors for each child; and (2) the importance of structural features of words decreases across age levels and indicates that there are developmental characteristics of word recognition that relate to comprehension performance. (One table of data is included.) (RS)

Intercultural Education, 2010