Contribution of the Incomplete Use of Macro-Rules to Reading Comprehension Difficulty in Japanese Fourth to Sixth Graders

The purpose of the study was to investigate the background factors involved in reading comprehension difficulty by examining the contribution of the incomplete use of three macro-rules namely, the deletion rule, generalization rule, and construction rule as well as the poor understanding of the reversible relationships in single paragraphs. The results revealed that the performance of fourth to sixth graders who had difficulties with Kanji reading was low in understanding the reversible relationship of a text in a single paragraph; verbal working memory was shown to be the significant background factor. Deletion of the less important parts of sentences, namely, applying the macro-rule of deletion, was found to be the background factor of reading comprehension difficulty in all graders who had no difficulty with Kanji reading. It is clarified that the background factors of reading comprehension difficulty vary between children with or without Kanji reading difficulty. Consequently, special support for facilitating reading comprehension is needed differentially.