Emotional understanding in reading comprehension at the text, task, and reader levels: a comparison of diverse struggling readers

According to the multidimensional view of reading comprehension (RAND), reading comprehension (RC) is influenced by three components‏: the reader, text, and task. A broader perspective considers factors beyond the cognitive and linguistic dimensions and incorporates the contribution of emotional condition. The present study examined individual differences in readers’ literacy and emotional involvement in the RC process, including ‏the reader, text, and task components. A total of 230 Hebrew-speaking students in the fourth and fifth grades received a battery of emotional and non-emotional vocabulary, word reading, RC measures (simple and mental inferencing questions), and comprehension of different text types. The students were classified as typical readers (TRs), poor readers (PRs), minority-language (ML) students, and students with learning disabilities (LDs). In monitoring the reading fluency measure, an analysis of variance revealed that students with LDs performed significantly lower in all variables than the TRs and PRs. They also performed lower than the ML students in emotional factors such as comprehension of narrative texts and the theory of mind task. The findings highlight the language-specific nature of gaps in ML students vis-à-vis the complex multicomponent nature of deficits in students with LDs.