Up to the present, the Centre de Recherches et d'Applications Pedagogiques en Langues has approached the development of reading comprehension skills in English as a second language in terms of morpho-syntactic development. This article proposes to examine difficulties in reading comprehension based not on morpho-syntax but on the textual and functional structure of a text. It is felt that priority should be given to teaching foreign students how to extract rapidly and accurately the essential, purely informational content from a text. Future work is expected to formalize a method for the identification of essential textual information and to investigate the depth of comprehension of foreign students reading in their mother tongue. This in turn should lead to a redefinition of the concept of reading comprehension. (Author/AM)