As reported by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA; 2009), 19.6% of French teenagers show difficulties in reading. To deal with these readers better, it is essential to identify the fundamental processes involved in the reading that they are deficient in. This critical review of literature proposes to synthesizing the data on reading at the middle-school normal reading abilities from the general theoretical framework of Gough and Tunmer (1986). It contained two parts: the predictors of reading comprehension and the predictors of written words identification.