Children’s Reading Comprehension Difficulties: Nature, Causes, and Treatments

The goal of reading is to extract meaning from text, and this depends upon both decoding and language-comprehension skills. Recently there has been growing interest in children who can read accurately but have poor comprehension. Reading-comprehension impairment is relatively common, although it often goes unrecognized in the classroom. Children with reading-comprehension impairment have a range of oral-language weaknesses, which impede their comprehension of both written and spoken language. Recent studies indicate that these underlying oral-language difficulties can be ameliorated by school-based interventions, which can, in turn, improve both reading- and listening-comprehension skills. Early interventions to reduce such language-learning weaknesses potentially have very important educational, social, and economic implications.