This thesis reports on an Action Research case study into the teaching of comprehension strategies to Grade 8 learners in a rural high school in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. The learners in this study, who were studying English as an additional language, experienced difficulties in comprehending English text. A series of six lessons were designed to teach comprehension strategies to improve the learners' performance in reading comprehension. The purpose of the intervention was to equip the learners with skills that would enable them to improve their reading comprehension and evaluate their effectiveness as readers. The intervention was also intended to assess my teaching, which was challenged by the need to deal with learners' poor levels of reading comprehension. The data was collected using the following research techniques: interviews, questionnaires, non-participant observation, learners' and researcher's journals, document analysis The data analysis revealed that a lack of resources to learn English; limited English language due to lack of exposure; and learners' lack of foundational knowledge from their primary schools were barriers to the successful teaching of comprehension strategies. Despite such barriers, however, this research provides evidence that teaching comprehension strategies can be effective if it is taught systematically, and applied continuously. Personally, I learnt that I had to modify my methods of teaching due to the response of learners to the lessons taught.

The contributions of executive functions to reading comprehension have been well studied in the general population. Additionally, many studies have examined executive functioning in children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). However, few studies have examined the relationship between the three concepts. Hence, this study examined the relationship between executive functions and reading comprehension within the context of ADHD and its symptoms. Data from children with ADHD and controls were obtained from larger, grant-funded studies. Both lab-administered and questionnaire measures were utilized. It was hypothesized that verbal working memory, planning, shift, and proactive interference would contribute to reading comprehension, both in the total sample and in ADHD. Behavioral inhibition was not expected to contribute to the relationship. Results suggest that verbal working memory is related to reading comprehension, both in controls and children with ADHD. However, no other executive functions were related to reading comprehension when controlling for basic reading and language comprehension. These control variables made significant contributions in the analyses, which suggests they are important to consider when examining the relationship between executive functions and reading comprehension. Hence, future research should examine verbal working memory in relation to basic reading and oral language when studying its contribution to reading comprehension.

Reading comprehension assessments often vary from one measure to another related to the response format required, passage length and other variables. Yet, these measures purport to assess the same skill of reading comprehension, and they are often used interchangeably. Over the last decade some reading researchers have raised concerns that the variability in reading comprehension assessments may mean these measures are assessing different components of reading comprehension instead of consistently assessing one well-defined, complex skill. This study compared two commonly used reading comprehension assessments: the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test- Reading Comprehension (WIAT-RC) subtest, which requires examinees to read longer passages and answer open ended questions, and the Woodcock Johnson Passage Comprehension test (WJ-PC), which requires examinees to read very short passages and fill in the one word that is missing. This study was designed to test whether performance on these two measures is predicted by the same underlying language and executive functioning skills (a form of convergent validity) and whether these two measures are commensurate in predicting performance on a ‘real-world’ reading comprehension task (GRE verbal questions), with the latter being a test of ecological validity. Results suggested that the two measures varied in their ability to predict performance on the GRE verbal questions, where the WJ-PC significantly predicted performance on these questions, while the WIAT-RC did not. None of the executive functioning skills included in analyses significantly predicted performance on either the WJ-PC or the WIAT-RC, so no difference was found there; however, there were differences in how the language skills predicted performance on the two measures. Both vocabulary and word reading predicted significantly more variance in performance on the WJ-PC than the WIAT-RC. Overall, these results suggest there are important differences between these two reading comprehension measures, related to which underlying skills influence performance on each measure and the two tests’ ecological validity. These differences raise concerns about how well the reading comprehension construct has been defined and how consistently that complex skill is assessed across different measures. In addition, the differences between these two tests should be considered by clinicians who use and interpret scores on these measures in clinical settings.

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