The Most Common Reading Difficulties
When your child learns the alphabet, they are becoming phonemically aware. As they become more fluent in their phonemic awareness, they begin to develop phonological awareness which allows them to work with word parts, syllables, oral rhymes and words that do not follow the phonemic rules.
Most children will develop an understanding of the letters and corresponding sounds of the alphabet by the end of Kindergarten. Their phonemic awareness should be quite evident at this age and stage.
Unfortunately, most schools and teachers are not required to measure the proficiency of their student’s reading skills until the end of 3rd grade. This is unfortunate because there is sufficient research in the educational world to substantiate the necessity of measuring literacy development in the early years of elementary school.
The most common reading difficulties that educators are directly dealing with fall into one or more of three main categories: Specific Word Reading Difficulties (SWRD), Mixed Reading (MRD) Difficulties or Specific Reading Comprehension Difficulties (SRCD).
One indication of an SWRD would be poor spelling skills. If a child is struggling with grade level appropriate spelling words this could be an indication that this child has below average phonemic and phonological skills which cause the student to struggle to decode the individual sounds that make up a word. Until this step is resolved, fluency and comprehension will be more difficult to develop.
Mixed reading difficulties include difficulties with decoding, reading comprehension and fluency.
Specific reading comprehension difficulties have all of the same problems as mixed reading difficulties but there is also an issue with listening comprehension and oral vocabulary.
All three common reading difficulties begin with decoding problems in the earliest stages of literacy development during a student’s education.
Since schools are not legally required to measure literacy development skills until the end of third grade, much of the task to identify a struggling reader who might need remedial instruction is placed upon those who are nearest and dearest to the student: parents and caregivers.
The Most Common Causes Reading Difficulties
If your child is showing signs of having difficulty as they learn to read, it would be helpful to know why they are struggling. Searching for the root of the cause is always extremely helpful for targeting the specific issues surrounding your child’s difficulty and while developing a proper systematic plan for remediation.
Some of the most common learning disabilities that can hinder proper literacy development include poor vision, poor hearing, ADD, ADHD, autism, dyslexia, Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI) or any combination of intellectual or neurological development disorders.
We live in a fortunate era of educational research, development, continuing education for teachers, and technology. The combination of these factors presents a multitude of solutions for parents, educators and students to remedy the majority of reading difficulties. Even more fortunate is that due to continual research and advances in education and technology, many of the programs and solutions that are implemented to help remediate a struggling reader are customized to provide specific and targeted instruction.
Lighthouse Reader is a customizable solution that has been designed to address specific learning disabilities like autism, dyslexia, attention disorders, mind wandering and Cortical Visual Impairments- which are primarily brain based rather than vision based disorders.
Lighthouse Reader is an extremely effective instructional tool for literacy development in students who require reading remediation. It is important to understand the challenges and the steps to remediation for struggling readers in order to understand just how effective the Lighthouse Reader is.
Important Elements of Reading Remediation
Assessments
When you suspect that your child or one of your students might be showing signs of reading difficulties, the first step to intervention is to conduct an informal assessment to measure your student for basic literacy skills that will set the foundation for developing proficiency with decoding, fluency and comprehension.
Phonemic awareness is the building block that all other reading skills will develop upon. The primary reading skill that every child needs to start with is recognition of each letter of the alphabet, followed by the connection of a sound for each of the letters that the child recognizes. If a student recognizes a letter but struggles to connect the proper sound to that letter, it will be increasingly difficult to string sounds together in succession and develop the fluency to look at a string of letters as one unit that makes a word.
Difficulties at this primary level could be caused by many factors. The simplest first step to explore is vision. If a pair of glasses is the only object hindering a child’s ability to learn and develop their skills at an appropriate grade level and beyond, then the work is done and you can rest easy.
Some reading difficulties will prove to be more challenging if the learning disabilities are directly related to an intellectual disability associated with autism, Cortical Visual Impairment, attention deficit or any form of neurological or developmental disorder.
There are several ways to assess a student for reading skills, fluency skills and comprehension. Testing for letter recognition and their correlating sounds can be as easy as testing your child’s skills with flash cards and asking them to name the letter and the sound or sounds that they make.
A more formal assessment that many teachers use is the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) for sound fluency. If the student shows proficiency with recognition, there are other measures that can be assessed such as first sounds fluency, phoneme segmentation and segmentation fluency. If a student becomes proficient at decoding, it is much easier to predict which letters (phonemes) are appropriate for building a word. Once they have mastered the basic sounds, blends and rules the student can then move on to the “rule breakers” and the vowel combinations that a student needs to intentionally learn as they develop higher literacy skills.
Lighthouse Reader is a perfect tool for developing the necessary skills that will lead to recognition, sound correlation, reading fluency, better comprehension and even improved spelling skills. Your student can choose their own book directly on the Lighthouse Reader website, open the book in the program and modify the text of the book to accommodate their individual learning disabilities. For example, if a student with autism is easily overwhelmed with vast amounts of text when they open a book, the Lighthouse Reader can highlight one word at a time, shade above and below a line of text, highlight words in a karaoke fashion while the student reads or your student can seek help directly from the audio reader and follow the text as the programmed assistant reads to the child.
As the student progresses through some of their books online and begins to develop some fluency, the Lighthouse Reader automatically performs assessments while your child is reading. Every 1 to 2 pages, the Lighthouse Reader will conduct a cloze assessment which measures comprehension by providing a “fill in the blank” for your child to respond to. Using this information, the Lighthouse Reader will determine your child’s Lexile® measure and use the results to adjust their reading levels automatically as they develop more proficient skills.
Identification
Identification is the first step to remediation. Educators have to know where the struggling student’s gaps are in order to help fill them. There is an effective sequence of literacy instruction, but even a well established program of instruction can be revised to meet a particular student’s individual needs.
After informal literacy assessments have been completed and there is clarity on the cause of the student’s reading difficulties, there are specific ways to address these reading struggles which are specific to each of the learning disabilities mentioned above.
Lighthouse Reader is a wonderful tool for assessment and for helping your student engage with text on a personalized level once their needs have been identified.
Consider how the Lighthouse Reader is directly designed to accommodate Cortical Visual Impairments. A child with CVI, which is a neurological disorder that disturbs visual pathways in the brain, can adjust the reader by changing the color of the font, the tone of the background behind the text and most importantly there is a word bubble feature, which highlights around the shape of the word, that has been researched extensively and found to reduce some of the difficulty with word recognition.
Direct Instruction for Reading Remediation
Generally speaking, there are a sequence of steps to remediation for struggling readers that applies to all students with various disabilities. The most important parts of reading remediation are:
*Intentional- as educators, we know that after we have identified the cause for the struggle that we are required to develop an effective plan that directly helps the student with their specific struggle. If they are struggling to decode, educators are obligated to go back and reinforce those beginning skills before moving on.
*Explicit- effective teachers explain concepts to students in such a way that the explanations are clear and detailed and the students are not left with any confusion or doubt after the teaching.
*Direct- struggling readers need one to one, customized, and personalized instruction that meets them were they are at and helps them to develop the literacy, fluency and comprehension skills that they need to meet their intellectual ability or grade level expectations. Educators and parents can provide this face to face and the Lighthouse Reader can provide this through direct, customized instruction that continually monitors and adjusts reading levels as the child progresses through the program and develops their reading skills.
*Sequenced- reading remediation has a specific order to it for a very good reason. A child must be able to recognize to decode; a student must be able to decode to read words and recall sounds to spell; recognition and decoding must become natural in order for fluency to occur. Fluency is a key to comprehension because if a student is struggling to read through text, it is reasonable to assume that the focus is on trying to figure out a word and the context of the text as a whole becomes lost in the struggle.
*Systematic- systematic instruction is a culmination of all of the above elements. Systematic teaching is well planned based upon the student’s deficiencies and it builds upon what the student already knows. It is intentional, explicit, direct and it follows a logical sequence from the simplest concepts to more challenging concepts as the student develops higher literacy skills. When teaching literacy the instructional sequence starts with phonemic awareness and progresses toward fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.
*Specific- being specific is absolutely necessary to reading remediation. Many of the literacy skills that are necessary to build fluency and comprehension are skills that require repeated exposure and practice to learn and build upon to acquire the skills that follow. Knowing exactly what your student struggles with allows educators to effectively target their instruction.
Reading Remediation Requires Continual Monitoring and Assessment
Effective literacy instruction that follows an intentional, direct, sequenced, systematic, explicit and specific approach to teaching is a lot of work for any parent or educator. At each milestone, it is necessary to measure the student’s progress and revise instruction to meet the reader where they are at.
Lighthouse Reader has close assessments for measuring Lexile® growth, fluency assessments, and spelling bees with parent or coach created assessments. All of these activities can be paired with earning badges to provide positive reinforcement for a job well done.
In addition to automated assessments, Lighthouse Reader provides visually customizable features, social activities like book clubs and tournaments, goal tracking, homework tracking and parental controls to monitor chat rooms and social media sharing.
If your child struggles with: a wandering mind, autism, dyslexia, Cortical Visual Impairment, ADD, ADHD, a pervasive developmental or neurological disorder or other learning disabilities, Lighthouse Reader can bridge the connection between a systematic approach to teaching and developing literacy skills and your child’s natural desire to use all of their senses and have fun while learning.
