Teaching reading comprehension

How should reading comprehension be taught? In recent years, the answer to this question has become a major issue, as reading comprehension remains poorly assured for many pupils at the end of secondary school, despite assiduous contact with the written word and mastery of word identification mechanisms. Today, we have a converging body of knowledge that provides a complex but integrated picture of language and text comprehension activity and its construction over the course of development. Empirical data from different fields - psychology and educational sciences - also show that structured, differentiated teaching of comprehension skills is a promising direction for helping the most fragile pupils. We will outline the principles of this approach in the light of the empirical work that has helped to establish them.