Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension: A handbook

The ultimate aim of reading is not the process but to understand what we read & comprehension can take place at many different levels. There has been an increasing emphasis on the importance of reading comprehension in recent years but despite this there is very little written on this vital topic accessible to trainee & practicing teachers.

The Handbook presents an overview of recent findings on reading comprehension &comprehension problems in children. It provides a detailed examination of the characteristics of children who have reading comprehension difficulties, & examines ways in which comprehension can be supported & improved. It is accessibly written for students & professionals with no previous background in the psychology of reading or reading problems.

This indispensable handbook asks the question ‘what is comprehension?’ The authors consider comprehension of different units of language: understanding single words, sentences, & connected prose & outline what readers (& listeners) have to do to successfully understand an extended text. This book also considers comprehension for different purposes, in particular reading for pleasure& reading to learn & explores how reader characteristics such as interest & motivation can influence the comprehension process.

Different skills contribute to successful reading comprehension. These include word reading ability, vocabulary knowledge, syntactic skills, memory, & discourse level skills such as the ability to make inferences, knowledge about text structure, & metacognitive skills. The authors discuss how each one contributes to the development of reading comprehension skill & how the development of these skills (or their precursors) in pre-readers, provides the foundation for reading comprehension development.

Areas covered include:

• Word reading and comprehension

• Development of comprehension skills

• Comprehension
• Assessment

• Teaching for improvement