The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of the meaning-centered sentence pause reading strategy
on the reading fluency and reading comprehension(i.e., realistic, inferential and critical reading) of fourth-grade
school children with poor reading comprehension. Children who face no difficulties in decoding words yet have
troubles in reading comprehension are called children with poor reading comprehension. Meaning-centered
sentence pause reading fluency refers to dividing a sentence into phrases by meaning and reading each phrase at
a time. The subjects were 20 children with poor reading from one of the schools were selected as an
experimental group, and the others from the other school were selected as a control group. The experimental
group took lessons by using the meaning-centered sentence pause reading strategy, and the control group
received instruction according to the teacher's guide of the Korean language. The experiment was implemented
in 16 sessions, 40 minutes each. To verify the effects of intervention, tests for reading fluency and reading
comprehension were conducted before and after intervention. The data was analyzed through a multivariate
analysis of variance (MANCOVA) using SPSS. The result was that the use of the meaning-centered sentence
pause reading strategy had a positive impact on the reading fluency improvement of the children with
poor reading comprehension. Regarding three sub-categories of reading comprehension, students in the
meaning-centered sentence pause reading strategy group showed significant differences only in terms of realistic
and inferential comprehension, In critical reading comprehension, however, no significant differences were found.
Some implications and discussions were offered.