Reading and listening comprehension: What’s involved? Successful reading comprehenders go beyond the individual words and sentences on the page and construct a meaning-based representation of the state of affairs described in the text. This memory-based representation is commonly referred to as a mental model or a situation model.
To become a successful reading comprehender, children need good word reading skills, robust vocabulary knowledge, an understanding of the grammatical rules that govern their language, and the inference making and integrative and skills that enable them to make links between the different sentences in the text and with information in the text and their broader general knowledge, to ensure a complete and accurate understanding.
Our research examines the language and cognitive skills that foster reading (and also listening) comprehension development and why, for some, comprehension breaks down.