The Development of Comprehension Skills

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the research into the development of children's reading comprehension skills. A number of aspects of comprehension skill that might limit the development of effective and efficient comprehension are considered. These areas range from efficiency of decoding and meaning access at the level of single words, through syntactic development, to inference making and integration of the ideas in the text as a whole. Areas that may affect comprehension development, such as amount of reading experience and motivation to read, are also discussed briefly. The chapter ends with a discussion of causal issues in the development of comprehension skill. INTRODUCTION: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO COMPREHEND?