Educational researchers Elvira Jéldrez and Macarena Silva, of the Universidad de Chile's Centre for Advanced Research in Education, with Kate Cain of Lancaster University, assessed 120 pupils from second to sixth grade across several Chilean schools, combining standardised tests of reading comprehension, word decoding and oral comprehension with a questionnaire on reading motivation. Published in the journal Reading and Writing, the study used cluster analysis to sort the children into four reader profiles.
The headline distribution was starker than the team expected: 88 per cent of pupils showed some form of reading difficulty. The largest group, 42 per cent, struggled with decoding written words despite adequate oral comprehension; 28 per cent had generalised difficulties; 18 per cent decoded well but understood poorly; and just 12 per cent qualified as good readers. Decoding problems appeared at every grade level, including sixth grade, where such basics are usually assumed resolved.
The motivational findings complicate comfortable assumptions. Children with generalised difficulties valued reading most highly, yet found it hard and boring, while the good readers found it easy but valued it least. Reading self-concept did not differ significantly across profiles. The authors conclude that motivation is not a single trait rising and falling with skill: a pupil can prize reading and still be defeated by it, so effective intervention has to work on motivation and language skills together rather than treating one as a by-product of the other.