ABSTRACT
The famous Milton family anecdote mimics the complex, interrelated nature of the essential reading skills so crucial to all successful readers. It also reveals how dependent reading comprehension can be on talk – which reminds us how reading emerged primarily as an act to be spoken. By better understanding comprehension, and what to do about it in the classroom, our pupils wondering about windmills in state of confusion can be converted to inspiring wonder about our world as it is explored via reading. Unless people grasp the meaning and utility of GCSE physics equations, this passage is near inscrutable. Pupils who behave more metacognitively – planning their reading, monitoring their understanding as they read, updating what they know and questioning what they do not – are more able to access complex texts and challenging tasks like answering an array of reading comprehension questions. The depth of our pupils’ reading comprehension is often only teased out in extended classroom dialogue.
