Some literacy issues are easy to spot. If a child is having trouble with spelling, the evidence is right there on the page. Likewise, problems with word reading become apparent as soon as you ask a pupil to read aloud.

But difficulties with comprehension can be much tricker to identify. A child who struggles to comprehend text may be able to read a passage perfectly while understanding almost nothing about its meaning.

Studies suggest that, on average, in every class of 30, at least two or three young people will have difficulty understanding text. However, research and policy have so far done little to address problems with comprehension. Instead, for the past 50 years, the focus has almost exclusively been on learning to read words.

It is only relatively recently that research has begun to look more closely at comprehension and to recognise the importance of skills such as inference in generating meaning. And there is still plenty of work to do before the national curriculum catches up with the new evidence (see “Going to bat for the neglected art of comprehension”, bit.ly/TesComprehension).

So, what is happening in the brains of children who experience comprehension issues? Jane Oakhill, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Sussex, has spent her career investigating this question - first as a primary teacher and now as a researcher.

She says that one reason why, historically, policy and practice have not focused much on comprehension is that the process of applying a skill such as inference is so intuitive for fluent readers that it is easily taken for granted.

Oakhill gives the example of this sequence: “Mary heard the ice-cream van coming. She remembered her pocket money. She rushed into the house.”

Lolly for a lolly

Good comprehenders will be able to make many inferences from this passage. The pocket money suggests that Mary is a child, rather than an adult. We can assume that she is running to get it because she would like to buy an ice cream. Meanwhile, our background knowledge of the way that ice-cream vans operate helps us to understand why Mary is rushing: to get to the van before it drives away.

However, for poorer comprehenders, some or all of these ideas may remain out of reach.

“Inference ability is very important to reading comprehension and, in particular, the ability to utilise background knowledge in making inferences,” Oakhill says.

The process of effective comprehension, she continues, is both integrative (being able to integrate information present in the text to make connections within it) and constructive (incorporating general knowledge from outside the text to fill in missing details and understand it as a whole).

“These are ideas relating back to research in the 1970s, when people started thinking that understanding of texts was not just about forming a memory representation of the words in the text - the literal meaning - but an understanding of the situation represented in the text, and relating it to relevant background knowledge,” she explains. “That’s why people have slightly different interpretations of, and memories for, the same text.

“A text is more than a list of sentences. We have to use the linguistic cues that are there to integrate sentences in a meaningful way. Poor comprehenders have trouble with that. They are bad at both integrating text across sentences and constructing meaning from the text overall.”

Crucially, this is not the same as a language disorder; it is about a failure to process the text, regardless of whether it is read or heard.

There is also a common misconception that issues of comprehension stem from working memory problems. And although there is a correlation between the two - a certain amount of working memory seems to be required to make inferences - Oakhill says her work has turned up no evidence for a causal link.

She cites a 2016 meta-analysis, which explored the research on the effectiveness of working memory training programmes and found that they produced “short-term, specific training effects that do not generalise to measures of ‘real-world’ cognitive skills”, such as reading comprehension. Ultimately, she says, you can have a good working memory and still struggle with comprehension, because the issue is about processing. Good comprehenders are able to process effectively and make links, while poor comprehenders are less active processors.

So, how can teachers spot students struggling with comprehension? And what can they do to support them? The answer lies not in reading but talking, Oakhill says. The key is to speak to children about their thoughts on a text - whatever it may be - and pose a variety of questions.

“Teachers will probably have a good idea [of] whether word-reading skills are adequate or not,” she says. “But to get an idea of whether or not children are understanding what they read, teachers should be asking questions; not just literal questions but inferential questions, encouraging prediction and engagement with the story. They should ask questions that go beyond the text and encourage the use of relevant general knowledge.

“Some children will come up with answers that aren’t supported by the text, or won’t respond. If they’re having trouble in making relevant inferences, that’s a pretty good indication that they’re having comprehension difficulties.”

Ideally, this diagnostic reading would take place one-to-one, Oakhill recommends, but it can also be effective on a whole-class level. In fact, her research has found that even the most competent comprehenders benefit from working on inference and comprehension skills. “My view is that all children could do with some guidance on reading for meaning,” she says.

In summary

Another useful area to explore with potential poor comprehenders is “use of text structure”, which can be broadly summarised as knowing how texts work.

“This understanding can be tested in several different ways, some of which don’t even involve reading. Summarising the main points of a picture story, for example, or understanding the point of a title. Poor comprehenders will have more trouble with such tasks,” Oakhill says.

One common issue for students who struggle with comprehension is that they tend not to read as much as their better comprehending peers, so they are missing out on opportunities to practise these skills.

“If you’re good at comprehension, you tend to enjoy reading, read a lot, get lots of practice at comprehending and get better: it’s a virtuous circle,” Oakhill explains. “But that’s only likely to happen if you’re at least reasonably good at comprehension in the first place. If you’re a poor comprehender, you’re not going to do that - you need bootstrapping to help you make inferences and get the hang of things.”

Which means that it’s all the more important for teachers to nurture those skills in class. Unfortunately, this isn’t always happening. Oakhill says that when she asks primary teachers how they teach comprehension, some say they don’t do it because the children aren’t good enough at word recognition yet - sometimes even up to Year 3. “That sort of response drives me crazy, because it’s so important to get children used to the idea that texts are enjoyable, and to develop appropriate language skills and engagement with text, even before children can read,” she says.

Work around comprehension should begin in Reception, she argues, where teachers can share books and picture stories with pre-readers and engage in rich conversations about them, in order to develop the skills needed for comprehension of written texts. Those skills remain the same and are not about word-reading: they develop whether the child is being read to or reading for themselves.

“Even with picture stories, they can make numerous inferences,” Oakhill says. “It’s so important to get the idea across to teachers that teaching reading for meaning doesn’t necessarily require lots of reading - it requires lots of discussion about texts. Reading with comprehension is not something that is necessarily going to happen automatically once children learn to decode texts in their native language. We need to give all children the idea that reading is an active process.”

Zofia Niemtus is a freelance writer

This article originally appeared in the 1 February 2019 issue under the headline “Tes focus on… Inference”