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Comprehension of stories involves the decoding of the text, the activation of prior knowledge and, ultimately, the construction of a coherent mental representation of what the story is about. Nowadays, more and more 8-10 year-old children turn out to be poor comprehenders: they demonstrate text comprehension difficulties, despite proficiency in decoding and well developed low-level cognitive skills, like vocabulary knowledge. A few adaptive learning systems promote reading interventions, but not for poor comprehenders. The TERENCE EU project aims at building a learning system that adapts its learning material to the specific needs of poor comprehenders. For creating the conceptual model of the TERENCE system, we first need to understand (1) who the end users are, and (2) what the learning material is. This thesis first analyses and specifies the user requirements of poor comprehenders, both hearing and deaf, thereby laying the groundwork for building the ontologies of the conceptual model of TERENCE. The main learning material of TERENCE will consist in illustrated stories, and interactive games for reasoning about the stories. The domain sub-model of the TERENCE conceptual mode structures this learning material. It is thus composed of two main ontologies: one for stories, the other