Supporting Reading Comprehension Development

In this International Dyslexia Association Perspectives article, authors Jane Oakhill and Kate Cain explore the factors supporting reading comprehension beyond basic decoding and suggest critical skills that should form the core of literacy instruction and interventions to support poor reading comprehension. The article outlines which skills are critical, such as teaching specific vocabulary words, how to acquire new words, ensuring sentence-level understanding, supporting inferencing skills, monitoring for comprehension, and understanding text structure, and provides specific examples of how to do this in the classroom setting.