Four Decades of Research into Children’s Reading Comprehension: A Personal Review

ABSTRACT

A substantial amount of research has focused on children’s reading development and reading problems, but in comparison there has been relatively little research into children’s reading comprehension. This article provides an overview of the research that has investigated the skills and cognitive processes that support children’s understanding of text and reflects on the implications of the findings presented in helping children to develop and improve their comprehension skills. The article concludes by considering which avenues of investigation still need further exploration.

Acknowledgments

This article is based on my Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award Address presented at the 29th annual meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse in New York, 2019. In both the talk and subsequent article my aim has been to present an overview of some of my research findings along with milestones along my research path. In doing so I hope to not only summarize the development of and findings from my own and related studies, but also to convey the message that the research path is not always straight and smooth: Studies often don’t turn out as expected, and potentially important results might be overlooked. I would particularly like to acknowledge funding from the UK Economic and Social Sciences Research Council, the EU, the British Academy, and the British Council. I thank my main long-term collaborators for their inspiration and support (in alphabetical order), Peter Bryant, Kate Cain, Carsten Elbro, Alan Garnham, Phil Johnson-Laird, and Nicola Yuill, and thank Kate Cain and Carsten Elbro for providing comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. These children were subsequently termed “less-skilled comprehenders” or “poor comprehenders” or, more accurately, children with a specific reading comprehension difficulty. Throughout this article I typically use the term “poor comprehenders” for brevity.

2. With the inspiration and support of Phil Johnson-Laird (my DPhil supervisor), I began to consider children’s reading comprehension from a rather different perspective. Johnson-Laird’s (1977) research interests encompassed both text comprehension and deductive reasoning, but in both cases his quest was to detail the processes that occur as people reason and construct meaning. It is interesting to note that the collection of articles in which he and Peter Wason republished an edited version of Bransford and McCarrell (1975) article is called Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science, i.e., in a book about thinking rather than reading.

3. After I had completed my DPhil thesis, most of my studies were conducted in collaboration. In this area my two primary collaborators (both of whom worked as postdoctoral fellows with me) were Kate Cain and Nicola Yuill, and their contributions are evident in many studies described in this article.

4. The term “comprehension monitoring” is used in slightly different, although related, ways. It can be used to refer to a reader’s judgment of his or her own understanding but is more typically used to refer to a reader’s realization that something is amiss with his or her comprehension and the corollary of that realization: that some sort of comprehension repair is needed. Error detection tasks are typically used to measure comprehension monitoring in children.

5. Hypernyms are terms for superordinate categories. For example, rain/weather, dog/mammal, chair/furniture.