ABSTRACT
One group of problems which have received little attention are the reading comprehension disabilities. Most people have occasionally experienced what it feels like to have a specific comprehension problem. Comprehension failures can occur because of problems at any of a number of levels. A first level where difficulties can occur is in the conversion of the sentences of a text into their underlying ideas. The second level at which comprehension problems could arise is in the organisation of the ideas expressed in a text according to their interrelationships. A third level at which comprehension problems can occur is in relating the information expressed in the text to the reader's previous knowledge of any subject they read about. Perhaps the major reason that reading comprehension disabilities have been ignored is that so little is known about how we extract the meaning of what we read.
