This thesis project focused on the effects of intervention comparing basic skills and text comprehension instruction with 7-8 year-old students. A sequel of three studies over the course of three academic years had been carried out. Each study used different instructional strategies in order to find out how targeted training exerts its effects on output measures of basic skills and text comprehension. It was found that integrative methods simultaneously involving basic skills and text comprehension instruction are beneficial. Basic skills training had transfer effect to sentence comprehension skills. Text comprehension did not improve without explicit, targeted instruction. In addition, the findings provide empirical evidence for effective ways for treating poor comprehension in the presence of fluent and accurate decoding skills. Decoding and spelling appeared to be independent skills dissociated from each other.