On the research of children’s text comprehension

Abstract

Abstract The paper presents theoretical background and empirical research on text comprehension processes of a junior school-age child. The first part of the paper discusses the most influential models of text comprehension and inference making as centrally important component of comprehension. The research findings concerning children’s text comprehension are discussed as well. Further, we present our ongoing empirical research, which focuses on children’s inference making when listening to and reading an informational, narrative, and multimodal text. We focus both on the online and offline inferences, i.e., on the inferences during and after listening to and reading the text. The aim of the research is to find out how children make different types of inferences and to compare their individual skills in inference making. The last part of the paper outlines preliminary data collected via retelling technique after reading the informational text. The data indicate individual differences between children in processing and verbalising information from the text and beyond the text. However, to draw complex conclusions about individual inference making profiles of children, further research is needed.