ABSTRACT
It is easy to make the assumption that we know about reading comprehension. It’s the part of reading that’s beyond word recognition, it’s about understanding what we read, and it develops gradually and ‘naturally’, as a reader becomes more fluent, and more experienced, and more confident. This is the common sense view, but I want to challenge it and to suggest that reading comprehension does not develop ‘naturally’, that it can be helpful to consider separately the development of reading fluency and the development of reading comprehension and that, broadly speaking, current research suggests that reading comprehension is harder to get at, harder to develop, and even more complex than we had realised.
