Many students struggle with reading. According to the most recent NAEP report card, 33% of fourth-graders are not proficient readers (2019). By the fourth grade students are no longer learning to read, but are, instead, reading to learn. As a result, a lack of reading proficiency can deeply impact all areas of a student’s academic success.
There are many reasons why students may struggle with reading. Learning to read is a complicated process that requires many co-developing skills. Students learn foundational reading skills such as decoding words, phonemic awareness and word recognition, while also developing reading comprehension and fluency. The most common reasons typically developing students struggle with reading are deficits in those foundational skills children use to sound out words, recognize word patterns, and understand the relationship between letter sounds and how words are constructed.
Students struggling to read may also have additional conditions or considerations that impact their capacity to learn to read. English language learners, students with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, and students with other conditions such as ADHD or autism face unique challenges as they learn to read.
Struggling readers need help in order to improve. Without interventions readers who are not proficient in the early grades will continue to lack proficiency throughout their academic career. Fortunately, early assessment and intervention have been successful in helping students reach grade level reading proficiency. By understanding and assessing each child’s reading challenges, parents and teachers can find the personalized strategies to give each child the help they need to encourage the interest, skills and knowledge to be successful, lifelong readers.
Common Reasons why Students Struggle with Reading
Phonemic awareness, decoding, and word recognition are the most common issues for students who struggle to read. Phonemic awareness is the capacity to recognize speech sounds and translate them to reading and writing. Students who struggle with reading may have a deficit in phonemic awareness, demonstrated by trouble identifying words that rhyme, the number of syllables in words, the sound parts within words and similar sounds in different words. Targeting instruction in phenomes can help ameliorate this deficit and help students be stronger readers overall.
Difficulty with decoding and phonics is another area that may cause readers to struggle. Children who struggle to decode have difficulty understanding the relationship between letters and sounds and how they work together to form words, leaving them unable to sound out words or getting stuck when trying to read passages. Children struggling in this area will benefit from systematic phonics instruction to build foundational knowledge.
Vocabulary, fluency and comprehension are also very important components of learning to read. Students with deficits in vocabulary, fluency and comprehension often express a lack of understanding of texts, may use the same words repeatedly in their writing, may read so laboriously that it’s difficult to gather meaning or may struggle to retell information from stories. Working with vocabulary words, helping students identify word parts and root words, and teaching note-taking, predictive and summarizing skills can help students gain proficiency.
English language learners (ELL) may struggle with reading. Phonemic awareness might be particularly challenging for ELL students if they are not yet proficient with spoken English. Phonics might be difficult as well if there are sounds in English that don’t exist in the student’s native language. A lack of proficiency in English also makes word recognition, decoding and reading comprehension more difficult. ELL students may benefit from instruction that includes intensive language development and gives focus to the differences and similarities between English and the student’s native language.
Struggling Readers and Dyslexia
Students with dyslexia may struggle with foundational literacy skills such as word recognition, spelling, reading fluency, comprehension and written expression. Although letter reversal is a well known characteristic of dyslexia, letter reversal is only one part of an array of cognitive differences associated with dyslexia. Students with dyslexia experience difficulty sending signals from one side of the brain to the other. The left side of the brain sees things individually, like the individual sounds and letters that make up a word. The right side of the brain processes information as whole pieces, seeing words as shapes or pictures, rather than individual sounds. Students with dyslexia have a cognitive difference that impedes the two sides of the brain from communicating well. As a result, students with dyslexia struggle to understand written language.
These reading struggles often come to the forefront in early elementary grades as students with dyslexia experience challenges encoding and decoding words, associating letters with sounds, understanding how to break words apart into discrete sounds, forming or copying letters, remembering sight words and confusing similar letters or words. Students with dyslexia may also be more prone to other, coexisting conditions that may also impact learning to read and write, such as ADHD or dysgraphia.
There are many ways to capitalize on the strengths of students with dyslexia and offer many options to foster effective learning. For example, technology is a valuable tool for students with dyslexia. Using technology to help children with dyslexia access information, demonstrate knowledge and represent their learning can effectively ameliorate the challenges posed by dyslexia.
Other strategies that may help struggling readers with dyslexia include creating age-appropriate reading tasks that can both capture the interest of students and empower them to have agency in their choices. For example, if a student is reading below grade level, do not use literary sources that are too young for them. Instead, find sources that are at their interest level, while still meeting the targeted literary skills. Another good strategy is to maintain a digital portfolio that tracks each reader’s progress, so they can celebrate their achievements as they gain skills and competency. Help students with reading comprehension by offering support in isolating words, chunking words and breaking words down into component parts. Students with dyslexia may also benefit from multi-sensory engagements with text, for example, tapping words as they read, writing letters in clay or sand and using images along with words.
The characteristics of dyslexia are often categorized as deficits. However, personalizing reading instruction to capitalize on the strengths of each individual student will promote reading success. Strategies to help children with dyslexia include tracking progress through a digital portfolio, empowering students to have agency in selecting reading material they find engaging, maintaining age-appropriate interests while targeting individual learning goals, offering multi-sensory learning modalities and harnessing technology to foster literacy skills.
Student Readers and ADHD
Students with ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder) often struggle as readers. The primary characteristics of ADHD are inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity. Students with ADHD may struggle to pay attention to tasks, avoid tasks that require focused mental effort, be easily distracted, have trouble staying seated or still, and may not be able to follow instructions. As a result, students with ADHD may struggle to sustain the focus, motivation and engagement necessary for learning to read.
In “A New Approach to Attention Deficit Disorder” Thomas Brown uses a symphony as a metaphor to explain how ADD impacts the brain. For Brown, in the brain of a student with ADD, all the individual parts are played well by talented musicians, however, the symphony lacks a conductor to begin the music, align the tempo and manage the individual parts so they form a cohesive whole (Brown, 2007).
In this metaphor, the conductor is the executive functions of the brain. Executive functions foster the ability to prepare, organize and begin tasks, pay attention to details, regulate focus, alertness and emotional responses, sustain motivation and access short term memory and recall.
When reading, students with ADHD may struggle to maintain sustained attention. As a result, they may miss parts of the text, skip over words or sentences, lose track of where they are when reading and miss important details. Students with ADHD may also experience difficulty with the short term memory and recall necessary for reading comprehension; making connections within a text and making connections between the text and what they already know.
Fortunately, there are many strategies that can help students with ADHD become strong readers. Reading aloud or using recorded versions of books can help students with ADHD, who are often good listeners, gain more information as they follow along. Students with ADHD also benefit from understanding how text is organized, for example, with headers and summaries in non-fiction or with the 5 Ws (who, what, where, why, when) in fiction. Encourage readers with ADHD to visualize the story or make predictions about the story to foster their attention to detail. Empower readers to choose texts they find of interest and assist them in using strategies like note-taking, looking up words and identifying figures of speech to assist their comprehension. Readers with ADHD may also be more engaged if their reading is part of a social group like a book club.
Reading Struggles and Autism
Autism Spectrum Disorder is a complex neurological condition that impacts each student differently. Autism (or ASD) is referred to as a spectrum because it’s expressed through behaviors that may vary widely in severity for each individual. Children on the autism spectrum may have difficulty communicating or interacting with others. Other common behaviors associated with autism include delayed speech, a lack of understanding of emotions, processing issues, repetitive movements, and perseveration on an object or activity.
Autism is associated with some particular reading challenges. Students with ASD may struggle with phonological awareness. As a result, they may have the capacity to memorize many sight words, but struggle with associating letter patterns with sounds, using those skills to interpret unfamiliar words and translating spoken word sounds into correctly spelled words. Students with ASD may also struggle to associate meaning with words and phrases. Again, these students may memorize sight words well, but struggle with reading comprehension and fluency.
The difficulty that students with ASD experience in social interactions extend to reading skills. Processing language requires many simultaneous skills including comprehending a wide variety of words in multiple contexts, negotiating words with multiple meanings or figurative meanings, making inferences when information is missing, synthesizing information to determine the main points and purpose and formulate responses. These skills, which are challenging for students with ASD, are necessary for both processing spoken language and reading comprehension.
Technology may be a very helpful tool in helping students with ASD learn to read. Students with ASD may be less resistant to reading on a computer and are willing to spend more time on reading when the instruction is computerized. Other strategies that may benefit reading instruction for students with autism include direct instruction with repetition and a high level of structure, teaching sight words and phonological awareness simultaneously and offering extra reading comprehension support.
Conclusion
Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, in their article, The Importance of Struggle, for ASCD, argue that students may learn more successfully when they engage in productive struggle. For Fisher and Frey struggle is a necessary part of growth, a process in which students can fail forward to achieve deeper learning.
Timothy Shanahan, a long-time leader in the field of teaching literacy to young students, agrees. For Shanahan, there is too much emphasis in classrooms on “just right” texts – texts that are chosen to be exactly at each student’s reading level. Shanahan suggests that instead of working to find “just right” texts for students, we should, instead, create the supports and scaffolding to enable students to read challenging texts successfully.
Struggling readers aren’t failing. Struggling readers are working toward mastery of challenging tasks and texts, learning deeply and failing forward with resilience. Assessing each student’s literacy skills can help teachers and parents create individualized instruction, targeted interventions for specific areas of need and the appropriate supports and scaffolds for each student’s process. These interventions, supported with clear instructions, well-designed lessons, the opportunity to practice targeted skills and supportive guidance and feedback, can help each student read successfully. There are many reasons students may struggle to read. Supporting them in that struggle will help them build resilience, learn deeply, and develop the skills for life-long academic success.
References
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