Ameliorating children’s reading comprehension difficulties: A randomised controlled trial

The goal of reading is to extractmeaning from text, and this depends upon both decoding and language-comprehension skills. Recently there has been growing interest in children who can read accurately but have poor comprehension. Reading-comprehension impair-ment is relatively common, although it often goes unrecognized in the classroom. Children with reading-comprehension impairment have a range of oral-language weaknesses, which impede their comprehension of both written and spoken language. Recent studies indicate that these underlying oral-language difficulties can be ameliorated by school-based interventions, which can, in turn, improve both reading- and listening-comprehension skills. Early interventions to reduce such language-learning weaknesses potentially have very important educational, social, and economic implications. Keywords reading, decoding, comprehension, oral language, reading comprehension impairment, intervention Teaching children to read accurately, fluently, and with adequate comprehension is one of the main goals of early education. Reading is critical because a great deal of formal education depends upon being able to read with understanding. Reading difficulties will inevitably create educational difficul-ties, which, in turn, are a major source of economic and social disadvantage. But such difficulties may be reduced by suitable early intervention (Heckman, 2006). Reading comprehension depends on word recognition, and these two skills correlate around. 70 in the early grades (see, e.g., Juel, Griffith, & Gough, 1986). However, the less-than-perfect correlation between word recognition and reading comprehension implies that there will be children who have deficits in just one of these skills. It is well established that both these forms of selective reading difficulty are relativel