Children's Difficulties in Text Comprehension: Assessing Causal Issues

Abstract

In this article we consider the difficulties of children who have a specific reading comprehension problem. Our earlier work has shown that good and poor comprehenders differ, in particular, in their ability to make inferences, integrate infor- mation in text, understand story structure, and monitor their understanding. We outline some studies that illustrate the poor comprehenders’ problems and present two studies that use a comprehension-age match design to explore the direc- tion of causality between comprehension skill and other abili- ties.We also present data from the first and second stages of a longitudinal study, when the children were 7 to 8 and 8 to 9 years old. Multiple regression analyses show that a number of factors predict significant variance in comprehension skill even after “general ability” factors such as IQ and vocabulary have been taken into account. These findings suggest that, not only can children have comprehension problems in the absence of word recognition problems, but that distinctly different skills predict variance in word recognition and vari- ance in comprehension. The data support the view that single-word reading skills and the ability to build integrated text representations make independent contributions to over- all reading ability. We discuss the implications of these find- ings for our understanding of children’s problems in text comprehension, for deaf readers, and for remediation. Anumber