Competence in reading comprehension is an essential target in current education topics. PIRLS and PISA reports have shown that the results of Spanish schoolchildren in reading comprehension are lower than those obtained in other countries. The work carried out within the framework of the APICLE - EDU2009-10321 project, funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain, aims to better understand and contribute to improve the reading comprehension of students by facilitating thus their personal, academic and social development.

Understanding texts is a constructive process in which data that provides the text are as important as the previous information available in the memory (De Vega, Carreiras, Gutiérrez-Calvo & Alonso-Quecuty, 1990). Reading involves a transaction between the reader and the text, so that the characteristics and previous knowledge of the reader are as important for understanding as the information the text adds (Colomer & Camps, 1990). Comprehensive reading requires the reader to be able to integrate such information into units of global sense, in a representation of the content of the text which is much more than the sum of the meanings of the individual words (De Vega et al, 1990; Vidal-Abarca, 1998). During comprehensive reading, reader infers information, i.e., he understands some specific aspect of the text from the meaning of another or completes the meaning of some aspect of the text with extra textual information.

The so-called Simple View of Reading (SVR) (Gough and Tunmer, 1986; Hoover and Gough, 1990) considers that comprehension is the product of two processes: decoding and oral comprehension. This model has proved its effectiveness to explain a very high percentage of variation in the levels of reading comprehension of schoolchildren (Tilstra, McMaster, Van den Broek, Kendeou and Rapp, 2009).

On the other hand, according to Van Dijk & Kintsh (1983) and Adam (1985) we know that discursive organization of different types of text affects the interpretation of the reader. We also know that certain discursive organizations, such as the narrative text, facilitate understanding and formulation of certain inference types (Fayol, 1991).

The aim of this study is to explore the overall level of comprehension by comparing both modality (oral / written) and text type (narrative / expository) in children in third grade of primary education, when children have surpassed the initial learning of reading (Nakamoto Lindsey and Manis, 2007).

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