Research with school-age readers suggests that the contributions of reading and language skills vary across reading comprehension assessments and proficiency levels. With a sample of 168 struggling adult readers, we estimated the explanatory effects of decoding, oral vocabulary, listening comprehension, fluency, background knowledge, and…

Research with school-age readers suggests that the contributions of reading and language skills vary across reading comprehension assessments and proficiency levels. With a sample of 168 struggling adult readers, we estimated the explanatory effects of decoding, oral vocabulary, listening comprehension, fluency, background knowledge, and…

Failure to "activate" relevant, existing background knowledge may be a cause of poor reading comprehension. This failure may cause particular problems with inferences that depend heavily on prior knowledge. Conversely, teaching how to use background knowledge in the context of gap-filling inferences could improve reading comprehension in…

The influence of word recognition and conceptual knowledge on readers' comprehension of narrative text has become a fundamental assumption associated with text processing in the primary grades. Features of conceptual knowledge such as prior knowledge, content knowledge, domain knowledge, and discourse knowledge are believed to be significant…

A study examined the interrelationship among print-related skills developed prior to formal reading instruction and social class differences in these skills in 33 middle-class and working-class children attending one of two high quality, reading-oriented kindergarten classes. Two hypotheses were generated: (1) that correlations would emerge among…