Noting that although some children read aloud with apparent fluency, they fail to understand fully or remember connected discourse, this book brings together research on children who have a specific comprehension deficit. The book first provides an introduction and overview of adult and child text comprehension, and then describes the research. The book concludes that comprehension problems are not necessarily due to difficulties in decoding words or accessing their meanings. Rather, the book states that poor comprehenders have three main areas of weaknesses: in making inferences from text, in using working memory to integrate information into a coherent model, and in reflecting on their own comprehension. The book relates these findings to educational practice and makes suggestions for comprehension improvement. The book's nine chapters are as follows: (1) The Nature of Poor Comprehension; (2) Background: Reading, Remembering and Understanding; (3) Processing Words and Sentences; (4) Inferences and the Integration of Text; (5) Allocating Resources during Reading; (6) Metacognition and Reading; (7) Using Cohesive Devices in Narrative Discourse; (8) Methods of Improving Poor Comprehension; and (9) Conclusion. Twenty-two notes are included; 261 references are attached. (SR)