The first goal of the study reported in this article was to measure how well sixth graders understand newspaper text and whether they are able to derive the meanings of certain words in it from the context. For this purpose, the comprehension skills of 619 Finnish sixth-grade-students (aged 12-13 years) were measured. They read a newspaper article about shipwrecks in the Baltic Sea. They then answered 10 questions based on the article and explained the meaning of 10 underlined words in that article. The students’ scores for answering the questions were, on average, significantly better than their scores for explaining the words. However, those students who performed poorly usually performed poorly at both tasks: 90 per cent of the students who gave only 0–4 correct answers to the comprehension questions only explained 0–4 words correctly.

The second goal was to design a program based on research literature and the test results. The objective was to generate teaching materials and practices that would help students to: 1) understand various kinds of texts from different genres; 2) learn to derive the meaning of an unknown word from the context; and 3) learn how to explain the meaning of the unknown word.