There are many reasons why children may struggle as they learn to read. Children who have difficulties reading simple words, do not read books that are at their grade level or have a failure in the progression of their reading development often have weaknesses in early core reading skills such as phonological awareness and decoding. Students who show signs of deficits in core early reading skills are at risk for continuing issues as they progress to vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension skills.
Many students who experience reading difficulty can be helped with targeted interventions that address their specific weaknesses. Targeted instruction in phonics, phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, spelling and reading comprehension can help struggling readers achieve greater success in all areas at school.
The first step in helping students who have difficulties learning to read is targeting the causes for the reading delays. Common causes for reading problems include a lack of phonological and phonemic awareness and/or struggles with decoding and phonics. Common disorders such as ADHD and dyslexia may also cause reading problems. Issues with reading comprehension, vocabulary and fluency can, too, cause kids to struggle as they acquire literacy skills. Processing issues, such as visual and auditory processing disorders, can also cause problems for students learning to read.
Common Reading Problems: Phonemic and Phonological Awareness
Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in language. The English language has approximately 44 phonemes. The capacity to recognize and manipulate these units of sound is phonemic awareness. Phonological awareness is a broader skill that expands on phonemic awareness and includes the capacity to identify parts of spoken language – such as words and syllables. Children who have acquired phonological awareness have the skills to make rhymes and match words with similar beginnings.
Phonological and phonemic awareness are both foundational to learning to read and write. Research indicates that children benefit from explicit auditory instruction in phonemic awareness as part of their early literacy instruction. Proficiency in phonological and phonemic awareness is a proven predictor of each student’s success as a beginning reader.
Deficits in phonological and phonemic awareness can significantly impact each student’s reading development. There are a number of causes for poor phonological and phonemic awareness. Students with speech delays, students who have not been exposed to a rich environment of oral and written language, students with disorders such as ADHD and students with hearing impairments may struggle with phonological and phonemic awareness. Signs of phonological and phonemic awareness deficits include difficulty with differentiating sounds, creating rhymes and recognizing syllables.
Common Causes of Reading Problems: Phonics and Decoding
Phonemic and Phonological awareness are concerned with hearing, identifying and saying sounds. Phonics and decoding are concerned with understanding how those sounds translate to written words.
Phonics is the relationship between written letters and the sounds they make. Decoding is the process of identifying the sounds that letters and letter combinations make and using that information to correctly pronounce words. Students who are struggling with decoding are unable to read with accuracy at grade level, have difficulty with comprehension and may have trouble with engagement and motivation in academics overall. Students who have difficulty decoding may demonstrate knowledge of letters and sounds, but be unable to translate that knowledge into reading words; may struggle to sound words out and may work so hard to pronounce words that they’re unable to associate individual words with word meanings.
There may be many underlying reasons why a student struggles with decoding. Vision or hearing problems may cause difficulties for students struggling to perceive written and spoken words. Similarly, students with visual processing disorders may also struggle to decode because they may find it difficult to visually discriminate between individual letters and words. Each student’s prior educational experiences, at home, in preschool and in prior grades also impact their capacity to decode words. Students with gaps in knowledge, or who have deficits in their exposure to written and spoken language may need more time to gain decoding skills. Phonological awareness is also a necessary prerequisite skill for decoding. Students who have not developed phonological awareness will also struggle to decode. Attention deficits may also impact a student’s progress as they learn to decode. A student who struggles with sustaining focused attention may have difficulties gaining the knowledge they need to efficiently decode words.
Common Disorders and Reading: Dyslexia and ADHD
Dyslexia is very common. According to the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity, twenty percent of the population is dyslexic (2017). Dyslexia impacts the student’s capacity to gain phonological awareness and decoding skills. Dyslexia is a neurological disorder that causes problems for students learning to associate letters and letter combinations with the sounds they make. Dyslexia tends to run in families, and so, may be linked to an individual’s genes.
Dyslexia is a learning disability specific to reading and writing. Students with dyslexia may excel in other areas at school, but struggle with reading and writing skills. Early readers with dyslexia may struggle to learn the alphabet, rhyme, learn common nursery rhymes, correctly pronounce common words, associate letters with sounds, and decode words. Early readers with dyslexia may make reading errors that have no relationship to the words on the page, may avoid reading and may have long-term reading struggles in which reading skills are difficult to acquire and reading is persistently slow and awkward.
According to Dr. Roberto Olivardia, ADHD and Dyslexia can often be confused at diagnosis, because dyslexia and ADHD have similarities (n.d.). ADHD is an ongoing condition that impedes a student’s capacity to pay attention. Students with ADHD are also often hyperactive and very impulsive. Students who are unable to give sustained attention to learning tasks will struggle to learn to read. In addition, students with ADHD may have issues with slow processing speeds and slow naming speeds which may impede basic reading skills. Students with ADHD may also have working memory deficits which can negatively impact reading comprehension. Because students with ADHD struggle to engage sustained attention they may miss parts of the text, skip over words or sentences, lose track of where they are when reading and miss important details.
ADHD and dyslexia can be differentiated through a number of factors. Students with ADHD may be very strong readers when they find the material of interest, students with dyslexia, however, struggle to read regardless of the reading material they are using. Students with dyslexia may demonstrate a marked lack of engagement with reading, but may have a high level of interest in other subjects in school. Students with ADHD, on the other hand, struggle with attention deficits, hyperactivity and impulsivity in many areas. Students with dyslexia are often better listeners than their peers with ADHD. Students with ADHD may demonstrate better outcomes on reading and writing tasks when asked to slow down and take their time to give greater focus to the task; students with dyslexia do not necessarily improve with additional time.
Reading Comprehension and Reading problems
Decoding words is a skill that kids use to read words silently or out loud. However, children may have the capacity to decode words without understanding what the words mean. As children progress in school reading comprehension becomes increasingly important. Reading comprehension is vital for readers to become engaged, enthusiastic readers. It’s also vital because, as children progress through the elementary grades, reading comprehension significantly impacts academics as a whole as kids transition from learning to read to reading to learn.
Children who struggle with reading comprehension are unable to correctly tell others about texts they’ve just read, demonstrate a lack of understanding of the logical progression of stories, struggle to connect individual words and sections of text to create larger meanings, don’t understand the meanings of individual words and either lose interest or give up easily when reading.
Some common causes of reading comprehension struggles are related to deficits in the child’s decoding skills. If a student is struggling to decode words they may be giving all their focus to the decoding process, making it difficult to make meanings from the words. Students may also struggle with reading comprehension if the books they’re working with are too difficult, if they lack a good oral vocabulary, if they have a limited vocabulary of written words, if they have a visual processing disorder or if they have trouble paying attention due to ADHD.
How lack of fluency can cause reading problems
Fluency is the capacity to read accurately, quickly and effortlessly. Fluent readers read smoothly, in phrases and with appropriate intonation and expression. Readers must be able to read with fluency in order to understand what they read. As with decoding, if readers are spending their energy on individual words it can be difficult to understand how the words work together to create meaning.
Children who struggle with fluency may simply not want to read because they find it so difficult. They may make decoding mistakes and make word substitutions. Students struggling with fluency may sound awkward or choppy when they read, may get stuck as they read, may take a very long time to read and may be unable to demonstrate comprehension of the material they read.
A common reason why students may struggle with fluency is a lack of exposure to written words. Skilled readers have much greater exposure to written words than struggling readers. Deficits in naming speed may also cause problems with reading fluency. Naming speed is the speed with which students are able to recall the names of common things, including letters. And, as with other reading problems, struggling readers may also have phonological deficits that hamper their development of reading fluency.
Vocabulary and Common Causes for Reading Problems
Readers require a sufficient vocabulary to make meaning from texts as they learn to read. Children build vocabulary, simultaneously, in different modes. Each child builds a vocabulary of words they can say, words they can read, words they can write and words they can understand when they hear them. Words are learned as a receptive vocabulary (words that children understand when they read or hear them) and as productive vocabulary (words that children grasp more firmly, so they are able to use them when they speak or write.)
Children who have not experienced a word-rich home or preschool environment may struggle with vocabulary. English language learners, too, may have particular issues with vocabulary. Students who have difficulty with reading comprehension due to vocabulary problems may demonstrate a lack of understanding when spoken to or when reading. They may use the same words over and over in their writing or misuse common words.
Processing Disorders and Common Causes for Reading Problems
Children with processing disorders may encounter reading problems. Processing refers to the brain’s activity as it takes in information, makes sense of it and begins to respond. Visual processing is the activity of the brain as it takes in visual information. Visual processing disorders are different from visual impairment. Students with visual processing disorders may have excellent vision, but struggle to interpret visual input.
A common type of visual processing issue that interferes with reading development is spatial relation difficulty. Students who struggle to process spatial relations have trouble discerning where objects are in space and where objects are in relationship to each other. A spatial relations processing disorder makes it difficult to see words as individual units, discern the direction of text (i.e. left to right), and distinguish between similarly shaped letters. Visual discrimination, or the capacity to identify objects based on individual characteristics like color, pattern, form or shape, is also key to learning to read. Students with visual discrimination difficulties may struggle to identify letters and words, mix up similarly shaped words and have trouble distinguishing words from their backgrounds. Similarly, students with object recognition difficulties may struggle to consistently recognize familiar objects, such as letters and words, interfering with reading development. Students with visual processing disorders may also struggle with whole/part relationships. In other words, they may be able to recognize complicated words, but struggle to break them down into letters or other component parts. Conversely, students may be able to recognize word parts, but fail to synthesize the parts into a word.
Auditory processing, like visual processing, is concerned with the brain’s capacity to process sensory information. Students with auditory processing disorder are not deaf or hard of hearing, but, instead, may have difficulty processing what they hear. Auditory processing issues may significantly impact a student’s phonemic and phonological awareness, which are foundational reading skills. Students who struggle to process auditory sounds will have difficulty differentiating the phonemes within language and may be unable to recognize individual sounds within words, similarities between words and syllables in words. Students with auditory sequencing problems may process phonemes, but struggle with the order of phonemes in words, sometimes switching or mixing them up.
Proficient readers must process several types of information in order to read. As with many common problems with reading, visual and auditory processing disorders interfere with foundational reading skills. Readers with visual and/or auditory processing disorders, need targeted interventions to avoid reading failure.
Common Causes for Reading Problems and Targeted Interventions
Although there are many causes for reading difficulties there are also many excellent, targeted interventions. Once parents and teachers understand the reasons why a student may be struggling to acquire reading skills they will be well on their way to helping that student become an engaged and enthusiastic reader.
References
Learning at the Primary Pond (2018, Aug 4.) How to Teach Vocabulary During Shared Reading in K-2. https://learningattheprimarypond.com/blog/vocabulary-strategies-shared-reading-kindergarten-first-second-grade/
Learning at the Primary Pond (2016, Jan. 2). What Causes Decoding Difficulties in Beginning Readers and What Can Teachers Do About It? https://learningattheprimarypond.com/blog/decoding-difficulties-in-beginning-readers/
MacPhee, K. (2018, Aug. 15) The Critical Role of Phonemic Instruction in Reading Instruction. Scholastic. https://edublog.scholastic.com/post/critical-role-phonemic-awareness-reading-instruction
National Center for Learning Disabilities (2020). Visual and Auditory Processing Disorders. LDOnline. http://www.ldonline.org/article/6390/
Olivardia, R. (n.d.) Dyslexia and ADHD: Identifying, Understanding and Treating Reading Disorders in Children. Impact ADHD https://impactadhd.com/dyslexia-and-adhd-identifying-understanding-and-treating-reading-disorders-in-children/
Reading Rockets (2020) Fluency.https://www.readingrockets.org/helping/target/fluency
Reading Rockets (2020) Phonological and Phonemic Awareness. https://www.readingrockets.org/helping/target/phonologicalphonemic
Reading Rockets (2020) Vocabulary. https://www.readingrockets.org/helping/target/vocabulary
Reading Rockets (2020) Word Decoding and Phonics. https://www.readingrockets.org/helping/target/phonics
Silbert, L. (2014, Nov. 11) Poor Reading Comprehension. Learning Resources. https://tigertuesday.com/poor-reading-comprehension/
Spear-Swerling, L. (2006, May) Preventing and Remediating Difficulties with Reading Fluency. LDOnline. http://www.ldonline.org/spearswerling/Preventing_and_Remediating_Difficulties_with_Reading_Fluency
Tankersley, K. (2003) Threads of Reading. ASCD. http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/103316/chapters/Readiness~Phonemic-Awareness.aspx
Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity (n.d.) Signs of Dyslexia. https://dyslexia.yale.edu/dyslexia/signs-of-dyslexia/
