As an education mythbuster, I often get questions about statements people make. In recent weeks, one in particular has come up several times: “Reading comprehension does not exist.” For some, that may sound odd. For others, there may be something to it. Perhaps because it touches on something that has been bothering education for quite some time. But as is often the case, if you take the statement literally, it does not hold. If you try to understand it properly, the question becomes more interesting.

Let us start with what might be meant. The criticism is aimed at the idea that reading comprehension is a separate skill that can be trained through strategies. Spotting signal words. Identifying the main idea. Answering multiple-choice questions. As if, independent of content, you can simply “get better at understanding”.

For those who advocate a knowledge-rich curriculum, that last idea does not work. Understanding what you read depends largely on what you already know. Without prior knowledge, a text quickly becomes empty. That is well established by now. In that sense, the criticism is justified: reading comprehension is not a bag of tricks.

But jumping from there to “it does not exist” goes too far. Research shows that teaching strategies do help. At the same time, it is not enough. An old but still useful framework is Hoover and Gough’s model. Their Simple View of Reading presents it almost bluntly: reading is the product of decoding and language comprehension. You need both. That is why it is a multiplication. If you cannot decode, you cannot access the text. If you do not understand the language or the content, you gain nothing from it. You cannot do without either.

That model clarifies two things.

First, reading comprehension does exist. Not as a single isolated skill, but as an outcome. It is what happens when someone can access the text and has sufficient language and knowledge to make meaning from it.

Second, when we see problems with reading comprehension, they rarely come down to a single switch you can flip. It is almost always about the underlying components. Think of vocabulary, sentence structures, background knowledge and attention. But also the ability to make connections and to monitor whether what you read still makes sense.

A meta-analysis by Filderman and colleagues (2021) identifies two main drivers of reading comprehension:

• Strategy instruction (for example, identifying the main idea, making inferences)
• Building background knowledge (content and vocabulary)

I would do both.

At one point, I heard the argument for abolishing reading comprehension lessons altogether. The reasoning behind that bold claim was that we have treated reading comprehension for too long as a separate subject. With worksheets, strategies and tests that have little to do with real texts and real content. While the biggest leverage often lies elsewhere: building knowledge, offering rich language, and thinking through texts together.

But that is less visible. Harder to measure. And above all, it takes time.

So when someone says “reading comprehension does not exist”, I would read it like this: it does not exist as a separate, transferable skill that can be trained independently of content.

But it does exist as both a problem and a goal. Students who can read but do not understand what they read are not a fiction. And the answer does not lie in more tricks, but, I would argue, in better teaching: attention to knowledge, language and meaningful texts.