For Every Reading Problem- There is a Solution
It might sound cliché, but there is truth to the old saying that for every problem, there is a solution. This also applies to children who have been identified with reading problems. Reading problems can stem from a variety of medical difficulties and/or environmental conditions like vision or learning problems- most of which have been the topic of research, teacher education, professional development for educators, therapeutic intervention and the direct intervention and differentiated instruction in the classroom.
The Most Common Causes of Reading Problems
Problems with Dyslexia
Are some of the most common disorders that can cause struggles and difficulties with literacy and comprehension skills. Children who struggle with dyslexia struggle with decoding, processing, fluency and learning how to read due to a fairly common neurological disorder that interprets and processes information differently. The most common signs of difficulties are: letter reversals like b/d, p/q and common similar word reversals like nap/pan or lap/pal. These children also exhibit slow and hesitant reading or losing their place while they read. Many of these children skip passages and words, mispronounce or struggle by assuming a completely wrong interpretation of a word while reading words like home instead of honey. These children also have problems and difficulties with comprehension and poor memory of what was read. It is common for these children to exhibit poor spelling and sloppy handwriting. With this great struggle to read, the chances of children processing and making gains in reading fluency and comprehension are slim to none.
A significant difference between a child with dyslexia and a child that shows the same signs due to intellectual difficulties is IQ. Children who are identified with a dyslexic disorder are typically of normal intelligence- they simply struggle with processing. A child with an IQ of 70 or below would be classified as a student with an intellectual disability rather than dyslexia- but the solutions are similar.
Problems with Focus and Attention Deficit Disorders
Are common struggles for children in school. ADD and ADHD cause reading and learning struggles for about half of the children who are diagnosed and about one third of the students who have an attention deficit disorder will also struggle with dyslexia. When ADD/ADHD partners with dyslexia it can be a recipe for great confusion. The lack of ability to focus on the text coupled with the decoding and processing issues associated with dyslexia greatly affect the fluency and comprehension skills that the child should be developing at their current age and stage as they practice how to read aloud.
There are two common types of attention deficit disorders- ADD which is marked by a severe inability to focus and ADHD which includes hyperactivity as part of the diagnosis. Children with ADD will struggle with attention and retaining information while children with ADHD have an added problem with controlling their impulsivity and remaining still for long periods of time.
The unfortunate problem for the student with ADD without hyperactivity is that they can get lost in the mix in school settings. They may appear to be fully attentive yet understand absolutely nothing after reading or listening to instruction. The typical indicator for these struggling students come in the form of poor grades.
A child with ADHD stands out at home or in a classroom setting. These are the fidgety children that are constantly leaving their seats, they are disruptive during classroom instruction and often incite other students to become disruptive. These kids often yell out of turn instead of raising their hands or waiting for their turn to speak. These children also display significant frustration with academic tasks and instruction that they cannot focus upon or comprehend.
Comprehension skills can be especially difficult for the student with ADD/ADHD because their common inability to focus prevents the student from staying engaged in the material. As a result these kids struggle to comprehend what they are reading, they lack the ability to retain several pieces of information and recall the information later to summarize information or paraphrase.
The common inability to focus that causes these students to skip words or large sections of text are similar to symptoms of dyslexia and lead to the same difficulties with fluency skills and comprehension skills overall.
Difficulties with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Pervasive Developmental Disorders
Are neurological, developmental disorders which can affect communication, social interaction, and a child’s emotional and academic skills.
This population of students is unique because children diagnosed with ASDs don’t always have the same presentation of symptoms- hence the use of the term spectrum. There are a broad variety of symptoms ranging from extremely low functioning autism to extremely high functioning autism that these children can display.
Children with low functioning autism often have little to no verbal ability. These kids also tend to have repetitive vocalizations commonly referred to as stereotypies, or they may exhibit the need for repetitive physical motions such as: hand flapping, rocking, and pacing. It is common for many of these children to have poor eye contact and flat emotional facial expressions, as well as obsessive and compulsive behaviors like performing tasks in a certain sequence. These children are often inflexible in expanding their interests or changing activities, and tend to be unresponsive to communication when spoken to.
Children with high functioning autism are more likely to be included in general education classrooms due to a higher ability to focus and learn. Children on the higher end of the spectrum are sometimes experts on a topic of interest because of their obsessive interest, and unlike the children who have lower functioning autism, they can be overly talkative when they discuss their interests. Children with high functioning autism often read without struggle and sometimes at an accelerated level when they are engaged in a subject of interest.
However, ASDs often partner with other common disorders. It is not unusual for a child with an ASD to have ADD/ADHD, Tourettes, Traumatic Brain Injury, or other intellectual disabilities that can affect focus and comprehension skills. In fact, it is quite common.
Common Difficulties with Auditory Problems
Can cause reading and writing problems if left undetected and untreated in children. One study in the UK tested 195 children who were identified with some level of reading difficulty and found that approximately 25% of the participants had some level of hearing problem.
If a child goes unnoticed with hearing loss, it can affect their speech and their ability to learn simply because they are not receiving all of the information that they need to process and understand. Early detection and early intervention for children with hearing loss can help remedy reading problems before they become too difficult to turn around or become a struggle that is permanently problematic.
Problems with Visual Disorders
Come in many forms. For some children, corrective lenses are the answer to the problem if early signs of reading difficulties arise.
For others, the visual problems can be processing problems that start in the brain rather than the eyes. Cortical Visual Impairment is one such problem that occurs in the brain and causes visual perception and learning problems because their vision fluctuates from one day to the next. It is a complicated condition that can manifest in several different ways: one eye may work better than the other, some objects might be easier to see than others, their field of vision might be restricted, problems with depth perception can cause difficulties looking and reaching at the same time, faces might be blurred while text is visible, additional effort to see objects can cause fatigue and sensitivity to light and contrasts can be overwhelming.
If a visual impairment has a neurological cause rather than a direct vision cause, the strategies for reading intervention are going to resemble the same interventions that are used for developmental disorders and attention deficit disorders.
One significant intervention strategy will be in the visual presentation of the words. For example, Lighthouse Reader uses a bubble feature to highlight the outside shape of a word so that a student with a neurological impairment such as CVI can “see” the word better. For some, it is the outer shape of the word that helps them to recognize the word and read.
For students on the autism spectrum, the presence of visual sensory problems can make the task of reading aversive because there is too much text or the high contrast between text and paper is too bright or perhaps too dim to grab their attention.
Lighthouse Reader features options to adjust brightness, highlight text, push and cover text, shade out extra text, and adjust background tones and font colors. All of these features are designed with consideration for struggling readers who are visually impaired.
Difficulties with Intellectual Disabilities and Learning
This category of struggling readers consists of the widest range of disorders and difficulties. It is here that you will find children who have various syndromes that can include: Down syndrome, Fragile X syndrome, developmental delays, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Prader Willi and other environmentally provoked disorders such as malnutrition or traumatic brain injury.
All of these disorders are characterized by an IQ of 70 or lower. All of them neurological or developmental at their core.
The Most Successful Solutions For All Reading Problems
While all of these types of neurological and developmental issues are unique by their own definition, they have something in common. All of these disorders and syndromes that cause reading difficulties can be treated by many of the same interventions with some slight modifications that address specific needs of each child.
Some general intervention strategies are as follow:
Start Your Child Early
If at all possible, try to identify reading problems as early as pre-school. Most children begin grasping phonics quickly and can develop enough phonemic awareness to start building fluency by the end of Kindergarten. The window of opportunity to implement reading intervention and get them reading at grade level becomes more difficult after third grade and sets them up for academic failure if left unresolved after third grade.
Break it down
Any intellectual or neurological disability will benefit from breaking the task down into smaller, more digestible bits of information. It can be extremely frustrating to any child with attention or sensory issues to sit for a long period of time and attempt to decode words and comprehend simultaneously. Rather, sit with your child and read for shorter durations or smaller segments of text, pause and discuss the material to allow the child to get up and move around before moving on with additional reading. This gives your child a chance to reflect on what they just read.
Allow Physical Movement
Children are designed to move! Even the students who do not have reading problems will learn better if they are using their bodies. Children learn best when utilizing all of the senses and movement can help with understanding and remembering by giving the brain time to assimilate what has just been learned.
Praise Efforts/Reward Progress
A basic human principle that works in all areas of life is that the more praise we receive the more likely we are to repeat that behavior that earned the praise. Your child will have greater motivation and progress if there is frequent motivation and praise throughout instruction.
Relevancy- Make it Interesting to Them
The more relevant the material is to your child’s personal preferences, the more likely they are to remain committed to the task of working hard at reading, discussing and understanding. It is your task as an educator to connect the child to the material and the best way to do that is to make it something that has personal value to them.
Make it Visual
Many children are visual learners, and children with autism or attention deficits can greatly benefit by visual learning activities in the form of educational games, videos or apps that are designed to keep children engaged while learning.
Immediate Feedback
It is Important to provide immediate feedback to encourage success and avoid practicing mistakes. The longer a mistake is repeated, the harder it is to correct the mistake. It is also important to provide continued praise and motivation at each and every milestone.
Clear Directions
Make sure that your child understands the directions when they are assigned a task. Ask them to repeat instructions back to you when you assign a task. This helps them to focus on what you just said and they learn the skill of paraphrasing and summarizing when given instructions.
Direct Instruction
Most children are not motivated or qualified to teach themselves. It would be especially difficult for a child who is struggling with reading problems. It is imperative that teachers and parents make an intentional effort to sit with the struggling reader and teach new words and material directly until the child demonstrates signs of understanding.
Comprehension Tips
Discussions and Prompts
Children who have the best vocabularies are those who were raised by parents who spoke to them continually during their early developmental years. This should continue in elementary school and beyond. While providing reading interventions, discussions and prompts (questions) are an excellent way to spend time helping your child to develop fluency and comprehension of what they just read and to help them develop critical thinking skills.
Access background knowledge and build on what they know
Building on previous knowledge is what teachers refer to as scaffolding. Think of a building or a tower with a wide solid base that builds each level upward with additional material (knowledge). The same concept applies in education with learning.
Creating mental images
Creating word pictures, is the ability for your child to see the story in their mind or describe the story so that the listener can visualize it in their mind. Being able to put words to a picture or create a mental picture by words is a skill that is essential to comprehension.
Summarize understanding
Being able to summarize a body of text teaches paraphrasing, critical thinking, vocabulary and develops understanding. This is a skill that should be exercised frequently to check for understanding. Without it, a child might read with fluency but have no recognition of what was read or the ability to explain it.
Special Considerations for CVI
In addition to the strategies already mentioned, a child with Cortical Visual Impairment or any other type of visual impairment might require additional modifications for reading interventions. These modifications can include the use of technology, magnification tools (handheld, enlarged photo copy or digital image expansion), braille books, or audio books
Special Considerations for Intellectual Disabilities
Children with intellectual disorder can benefit from additional modifications which take their individual needs into consideration. More movement may be required or maybe the material needs to be broken down further. The best strategy is to modify when necessary and give tons of feedback and praise.
Lighthouse Reader
Reading intervention requires a lot of commitment from parents, educators and students to resolve. It takes regular daily reading practice, continual feedback and progress monitoring to see the results of intervention. Lighthouse Reader supports all of these special needs populations by providing assistive technology that can be personalized by the user to make reading help more appealing. Your child can see it, touch it and say it with Lighthouse Reader. Students can use the Lighthouse Reader to enlarge the text or reduce it. They can adjust the amount of text that is visible, or push and cover the text to reveal one word at a time to reduce anxiety. It is the personalization that makes this program one of the best intervention tools available for your child’s reading problems. Lighthouse Reader can be used together with any evidence based reading strategies all while enjoying their favorite book!
