The NRP review found that reading comprehension achievement can be improved indirectly by teaching skills that enable comprehension.

• Teaching phonemic awareness to beginning readers leads to improved reading comprehension (p. 2-4, 2-5). Small-group instruction is especially effective (p. 2-4, 2-5, 2-20).
• Phonemic awareness (PA) training is also effective in improving comprehension for disabled readers at intermediate or higher reading levels (through at least GE 6) (p. 2-94).
• Systematic, as opposed to non-systematic, phonics instruction improves reading comprehension for beginning readers (p.2-94), and for older readers with a reading disability (p. 2-116).
• Teaching fluency using repeated and guided oral reading leads to increases in reading comprehension (p. 3-3).
• Finally, pre-teaching important vocabulary words before reading can also improve reading comprehension (p. 4-4).

All of the above suggest that a balanced approach can be used to not only work on individual aspects of the reading process, but to improve reading comprehension as well.