Understanding and Teaching Reading Comprehension

by Jane Oakhill, Kate Cain, and Carsten Elbro

The Handbook of Reading Comprehension overviews recent findings on reading comprehension and comprehension problems in children. It provides a detailed examination of the characteristics of children with reading comprehension difficulties and examines ways to support and improve comprehension. It is accessible and written for students and 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 language units: understanding single words, sentences, and connected prose, and outlining what readers (and listeners) must do to understand an extended text successfully. This book also considers comprehension for different purposes, in particular, reading for pleasure and reading to learn, and explores how reader characteristics such as interest and motivation can influence the comprehension process.

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

Product details

Publisher: Routledge

Language: English

Published: 2014

Paperback: 138 pages

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