Reading comprehension is routinely treated as both a construct and a target. We measure it, intervene on it, build policies around it. Entire programmes promise to improve it. But what if the problem isn’t so much that we’ve failed to improve reading comprehension but that we are not clear what it is?
I’ve long argued that reading comprehension is most sensibly treated as language comprehension in the context of written text. Once children can decode reliably at a fluent pace, the act of understanding text is largely the same as understanding speech. Where comprehension problems seem stubborn, the cause is often poor vocabulary or gaps in background knowledge that make certain sentences hard to interpret.
The crucial qualification is fluency. If children read too slowly, comprehension will break down, even if their oral language is strong. Slow, effortful decoding consumes working memory. Cognitive resources that ought to be available for making inferences, tracking references and inte…
