Chapter 6
Reading Difficulties
A. Reading Strategies for the General Education Classroom
If our children do not learn to read, they cannot succeed in life. Without the
ability to read, the opportunities for academic and occupational success are limited.
Unfortunately, over 80% of students with learning disabilities and related disabilities
encounter difficulties in reading (Lerner & Johns, 2012). In fact, the reading of books is
on a decline, with only 57% of adults reported to have read a book in 2002 (National
Endowment for the Arts, 2004).
It is critical to identify children with reading problems early and provide them
with appropriate early instruction. More than 17.5% of the nation’s school children—
about 1 million children—encounter reading problems during the crucial first 3 years of
schooling (National Reading Panel, 2000). Moreover, 74% of children who are
unsuccessful in reading in third grade are still unsuccessful in ninth grade (National
Institute for Child Health and Human Development, 1999). The reading problems of
adolescents and adults reflect reading difficulties that were not resolved during their early
years. The wait-and-fail method refers to the policy of not promptly addressing the
reading difficulties of young children but, instead, waiting to do so when they are older.
Because reading is the basic skill for all academic subjects, failure in school can
be traced to inadequate reading skills. Students today face more mandatory tests than ever
before, and they need to earn diplomas and degrees to obtain jobs. Overcoming these
hurdles, as well as facing the necessity of filling out application forms and taking
licensing examinations, makes life for poor readers difficult and full of impassible
barriers. In today’s world, high technology and automation have created a demand for
highly trained people. Telecommunications, e-mail, and the Internet all require users to
read and comprehend written electronic information on a computer screen.
The development of reading skills serves as the major academic foundation for all
school-based learning. Workers in every occupation now have to retrain themselves to
prepare for new jobs many times during their work/careers. Efficient reading is a key
skill for maintaining employment or retraining for another job. Poor reading skills cause
many problems for individuals in the world of work. Fewer jobs are available for
unskilled and semiskilled workers, and these individuals are likely to end up being
chronically unemployed. Opportunities for gainful employment decrease for youth who
drop out of school. Dropouts have twice the unemployment rate that high school
graduates do, so they have fewer opportunities for continued training. Further, they lack
the qualifications to attend postsecondary school or college.
Reading is not a natural process. In contrast to other developmental achievements,
such as learning to walk or to talk, learning to read requires careful instruction. Learning
to read is also a relatively lengthy process. It takes several years, and the learner must
persevere over a long period of time. Moreover, the process of recognizing words is
complex; readers must use a variety of strategies to accomplish this task. Children must
first learn to read so that later they can read to learn.
Many children with learning disabilities and related disabilities who have reading
problems receive their instruction in general education classrooms. Throughout this
chapter, we present many reading strategies for students in general education classrooms.
Including Students in General Education 12.1, “Reading Strategies,” gives some overall
suggestions for students with reading disabilities in general education classrooms.
Response-to-intervention (RTI) is a process for all students in general education.
RTI uses evidence-based instruction, and its purpose is to resolve reading problems by
using tiers of instruction. The condition known as dyslexia is an unusual type of severe
reading disorder that has puzzled the educational and medical communities for many
years. Actually, dyslexia is one type of learning disability that affects some children,
adolescents, and adults. People with this baffling disorder find it extremely difficult to
recognize letters and words and to interpret information that is presented in print form.
People with dyslexia are intelligent and may have very strong mathematics or spatial
skills. Student Stories 12.1, “People With Dyslexia,” offers the reflections of well-known
individuals with dyslexia about how this reading problem affected their lives.
The life stories of corporate CEOs with dyslexia show their remarkable skills in
the business world (Morris, 2002). People with dyslexia tend to find ingenious ways to
hide their disability. For example, a widowed gentleman caught in the social dating whirl
routinely handled the problem of dining in restaurants by putting down his menu and
saying to his companion, “Why don’t you order for both of us, dear? Your selections are
always so delicious.” This man hired professionals to handle his reading and writing
matters. His friends attributed his actions to wealth, never suspecting his inability to read.
For many years, scholars strongly suspected that dyslexia had a neurobiological
basis; however, they lacked the scientific evidence to support this belief. Today, the
cognitive neurosciences research provides strong evidence that dyslexia is caused by
variant in brain structure, a difference in brain function, or genetic factors (Rosen, 2010;
Pugh, 2010; Shaywitz, 2003; Gilger, 2010; Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 1998, 1999). The brain
research studies on dyslexia and the new technologies for assessing the link between
brain function and learning are fascinating. While neuroscientists continue their search
for the causes of dyslexia, however, teachers must provide the instruction to teach these
individuals how to read.
B. Elements of Reading
The National Reading Panel (2000) is a commission of reading scholars that was
assigned by the U.S. Congress to conduct an evidence-based assessment of the research
literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Finding that over
100,000 research studies on reading had been published since 1966, the National Reading
Panel established stringent criteria for the inclusion of research studies in their evidence-
based assessment. Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work
with the individual sounds in spoken words. Before children learn to read print, they need
to become aware of how the sounds work in words. They must understand that words are
made of speech sounds, or phonemes. The term phonological awareness is broad and
includes the ability to identify and manipulate larger parts of spoken language, such as
words, syllables, and rhymes, as well as phonemes. Phonemic awareness is a part of
phonological awareness. Phonological awareness focuses on children’s hearing and using
the sounds of language.
Reading requires the reader to recognize words. Once readers develop a facility in
word recognition, they can concentrate on the meaning of the text. Without these lower-
level reading skills, the higher cognitive skills cannot function. When readers exert so
much effort into recognizing words, they will have little processing capacity remaining
for comprehension.
Early attention to word-recognition skills is important because this early ability
accurately predicts later skill in reading comprehension. Children who get off to a slow
start rarely become strong readers (National Reading Panel, 2000). Learning word-
recognition skills early leads to wider reading abilities in and out of school. Reading a
wide variety of material provides opportunities to increase the student’s vocabulary,
increase the student’s interest in books, and foster the student’s general reading growth
(Moats, 2000; Henry, 2003; Lyon, 2003).
Phonics refers to the relationship between printed letters (graphemes) and the
sounds (phonemes) in language. As an essential word-recognition skill, phonics involves
learning the correspondence of language sounds to written letters and applying that
knowledge in recognizing words and reading. Children must learn to decode printed
language and translate print into sounds through the alphabetic principle of the symbol-
sound relationship, a process known as breaking the code.
Children with reading disabilities require systematic phonics instruction. A
systematic phonics program is a planned, sequential set of phonics elements that is taught
explicitly and systematically. Research shows that children who learn the sound-symbol
system of English read better than children who have not mastered this skill (Chall, 1967,
1983; Lyon, 2003; Moats, 2000; National Reading Panel, 2000). As noted, learning
phonics requires that the child has competencies in phonological awareness and the
ability to recognize that speech can be segmented into sounds. (See Chapter 11, “Spoken
Language Difficulties: Listening and Speaking.”)
Understanding phonics helps children break the code so that they can recognize
words quickly and easily. In a written alphabet language, such as English, the code
involves a system of mapping, or seeing the correspondences between letters and sounds.
Once a child learns these mappings, the child has broken the code and can then apply this
knowledge to figure out plausible pronunciations of printed words (Adams, 1990; Moats,
2000). Children with reading disabilities need direct instruction in phonics and decoding
that makes the relationship between printed letters and sounds explicit. Explicit code-
emphasis instruction helps children develop a basis for remembering the relationship of
sounds to the printed letters and for deriving the meanings of printed words. (See
“Teaching Strategies” section later in this chapter for phonics instruction.).
hildren who are taught phonics directly and systematically in the early grades
receive higher scores on reading achievement tests during their primary years than
children who do not receive this instruction (Chall, 1991; Lyon & Moats, 1997; Moats,
2000; National Reading Panel, 2000). Many teachers, however, lack a firm grounding in
phonics and phonics generalizations (Horne, 1978; Moats, 2000). Some teachers do not
remember learning phonics themselves, and many do not receive adequate phonics
instruction during their teacher training. (The reader may wish to take the Foniks Kwiz in
“Phonics Quiz and Review” on the student website that accompanies this book. A brief
review of phonics generalizations follows the quiz.).
Sight words are words that are recognized instantly, without hesitation or further
analysis. Unlike some other languages, written English has an inconsistent phoneme-
grapheme relationship, or spelling pattern. The relationship between the letter and its
sound equivalent is not always predictable. The letter a, for example, is given a different
sound in each of the following typical first-grade words: at, Jane, ball, father, was, saw,
and are. Another example of this complexity is the phoneme of the long i, which has a
different spelling pattern in each of the following words: aisle, aye, I, eye, ice, tie, high,
buy, sky, rye, pine, and type. To further complicate the problem of learning to read
English, many of the most frequently used sight words in first-grade books have irregular
spelling patterns. A few of these words are shown in the first column of Table 12.2; the
second column shows the way they would be spelled with a dependable phoneme-
grapheme relationship so that readers could “sound them out.” These irregular spelling
pattern words must thus be learned as sight words (Jennings et al., 2010).
Context clues help a student recognize a word through the meaning, or context, of
a sentence or paragraph in which the word appears. There are many redundancies in our
language, which occur when information from one source repeats or supports information
from another source. These language redundancies provide hints about unknown words
from the meaning of the surrounding text, which helps readers make conjectures and
guesses about unfamiliar words. Instruction in recognizing words through context is best
done by actual reading. When students with reading disabilities have consistent practice
in reading stories and books, they naturally learn to use context clues. The meaning of the
sentence plus the initial sounds in the word may provide enough clues for the reader to
recognize the word.
Structural analysis refers to the recognition of words through the analysis of
meaningful word units such as prefixes, suffixes, root words, compound words, and
syllables. Structural elements include compound words (cowboy), contractions (can’t),
word endings or inflectional suffixes (s, -ed, -er, -est, -ing), word beginnings or prefixes
(in-, pre-, un-, re-, ex-), roots (play in replaying), and syllables (i.e., breaking
multisyllabic words into smaller units). A reader may recognize structural elements of a
word (e.g., the prefix re- and the suffix -tion in repetition). These clues, combined with
the context of the sentence, may be sufficient for recognizing the word.
Readers should be encouraged to use all of the word-recognition clues (phonics,
sight words, context clues, and structural analysis). However, they will need these
strategies only when an unknown word stops the reading process. Readers usually use
several clues together until they recognize the unknown word. Students with learning
disabilities and related mild disabilities need instruction and practice in each of these
word-recognition clues to achieve independence and flexibility and to gain fluency.
Reading fluency is the ability to read connected text rapidly, effortlessly, and
automatically (Hook & Jones, 2004; Meyer, 2002; National Reading Panel, 2000).
Readers must develop fluency to make the bridge from word recognition to reading
comprehension (Jenkins et al., 2003). Many poor readers have difficulty reading fluently
because they do not possess an adequate sight vocabulary and must labor to decode many
of the words in the reading passages. With their energies focused on recognizing words,
their oral reading is filled with long pauses and many repetitions, and may be
characterized by monotonous expression. Fluent reading requires that most of the words
in a selection be recognized as sight words. When a selection contains too many difficult
(nonsight) words, the reading material will be too arduous and frustrating for the reader.
Automaticity is the fast, accurate, and effortless word identification at the single
word level. The speed and accuracy with which single words are identified is a key
predictor of reading comprehension. The range of children’s skill in recognizing words is
large. One research study reported that in a first-grade class, the number of words that
children recognized ranged from 15 words to 1,933 words. The average skilled reader
reads three times as many words as the average less skilled reader.
Repeated reading is an instructional strategy in which students read a passage
aloud several times. The repeated reading method is simple and straightforward,
emphasizing practice and repetition. Repeated reading improves fluency, comprehension,
and overall reading achievement (Jennings et al., 2010; National Reading Panel, 2000).
Research shows that repeated reading improves reading fluency for both elementary
students and secondary students (Nelson, Alber, & Gordy, 2004). The “Strategies”
section in this chapter describes strategies to improve reading fluency through repeated
reading. Fluency occurs when students begin to read easily instead of laboring through
reading material. Students need many opportunities to read if they are to gain fluency.
The books or passages that children read have to be at the appropriate difficulty level—
not too hard, but not too easy.
Vocabulary occupies a central position in learning to read. The student’s
vocabulary has a significant effect on reading achievement and is strongly related to
reading comprehension (Jennings et al., 2010; National Reading Panel, 2000).
Vocabulary knowledge requires the reader to not only know the word, but also to apply it
appropriately in context. For example, when 2 boys tried to make cookies, they were
puzzled when their cookies stuck to the pan. They had followed the directions in the
recipe and greased the bottom of the pan. Their vocabulary problem was they thought the
meaning of the word bottom referred to the underside of the pan. The part on which they
had been told to place the cookies seemed to them to be the top of the pan.
The purpose of reading is comprehension, that is, gathering meaning from the
printed page. All reading instruction should provide for the development of reading
comprehension. Reading comprehension is the major problem for many students with
reading disabilities. Comprehension skills do not automatically evolve after word-
recognition skills have been learned. Although most students with reading disabilities
eventually learn the basics of word-recognition skills, many continue to have great
difficulty with tasks that require comprehension of complex passages.
Reading can be viewed as thinking or as something akin to problem solving. As in
problem solving, the reader must employ concepts, develop and test hypotheses, and
modify those concepts. Thus, reading comprehension is a mode of inquiry, and methods
that employ discovery techniques should be used in the teaching of reading. The key to
teaching from this perspective is to guide students to set up their own questions and
purposes for reading. Students then read to solve problems that they have devised for
themselves. Students can be encouraged first to guess what will happen next in a story,
for example, and then to read to determine the accuracy of those predictions (Stauffer,
1975).
Readers must be active participants, interacting with the text material. They must
actively combine their existing knowledge with the new information of the printed text.
There is evidence that good readers generally do not read every word of a passage;
instead, they “sample” certain words to determine the meaning and skip many others.
They go back and read every word only when they encounter something unexpected. For
example, when people in love are reading a love letter, they read for all they are worth.
They read every word three ways; they read the whole in terms of the parts, and each part
in terms of the whole; they grow sensitive to context and ambiguity, to insinuation and
implication; they perceive the color of words, the order of phrases, and the weight of
sentences. They may even take punctuation into account (Adler, 1956).
Before reading a story, teachers should motivate and interest students in the
reading selection, review the vocabulary, build background information, and have the
students predict what the story will be about. During reading, the teacher should direct
the students’ attention to the difficult or subtle dimensions of the story, anticipate difficult
words and ideas, talk about problems and solutions, encourage silent reading, as well as
encourage students to monitor their own comprehension. After reading, comprehension
strategies can include having the readers summarize or retell the story, talk about what
they liked and what they wished had been different in the story, create graphic organizers,
put pictures of story events in order, link background information, and talk about the
characters in the story (Jennings et al., 2010).
Informational materials include subject-matter materials, such as textbooks used
in social studies or science content areas. As students move through the grades, the
reading tasks they confront change dramatically. Reading assignments in content-area
textbooks take the place of narrative stories. Students are often assigned to read textbooks
independently, without supervision or help. They may be required to read a chapter,
complete a written assignment on the chapter, prepare for a class activity based on the
chapter, and take a test on the content of the chapter. It is not surprising that many
students with learning disabilities and related mild disabilities cannot complete such
assignments. A student whose reading has been limited to narrative stories will lack
experience with, and the ability to do, the kind of reading that informational, content-area
textbooks require.
C. The Reading-Writing Connection
Strong ties exist between reading and writing. As students write, their reading
skills improve. Both readers and writers construct meaning. Readers construct meaning
from the author’s text; writers compose or construct meaning as they write. Young
children begin to grasp the insight that alphabet letters represent abstract speech
segments. At a very early stage of literacy development, young children begin to write
letters for words. For example, a child might write KR for car, TRKE for turkey, or
PTZU for pizza. Children should be encouraged to write. Acceptance of “invented
spelling” encourages children’s writing.
A contentious issue regarding approaches for teaching reading involves the
controversy between whole-language reading instruction and skills-based reading
instruction that includes phonics. The concept of whole-language reading instruction was
first introduced by Kenneth Goodman (1967). The underlying philosophy of this
approach was that children should learn to read in the same way they learned to talk. By
being involved in numerous books and stories and having many experiences listening to
stories, they can learn to read in a natural way. The whole-language approach quickly
rose in popularity in the schools during the late 1980s and the 1990s and was used in
many schools throughout the country. The popularity of whole language has waned with
the current emphasis on skills and phonics, but there are still many proponents of whole-
language reading instruction (Flurkey & Yu, 2003).
English-language learners (ELL) are students who are not yet proficient with the
English language, and their native language is not English. An increasing number of
students come from homes in which a language other than English is spoken. For over
77% of ELL students in the United States, Spanish is the native language, but over 350
languages are used by ELL students in U.S. schools (Samson & Lesaux, 2009; McCardle,
2005). Chapter 11, “Spoken Language Difficulties: Listening and Speaking,” provides
additional information about English-language learners. Many students who are English-
language learners have much difficulty learning to read in English.
D. Assessing Reading
One of the simplest methods of assessing reading is to observe informally as the
student reads aloud. The teacher can readily detect the student’s general reading level,
word-recognition abilities, types of errors, and understanding of the material. This
method is very practical and can be as informative as elaborate test batteries. The
informal reading inventory (IRI), which can be administered quickly and easily, provides
a wealth of information concerning the student’s reading skills, reading levels, types of
errors, techniques of attacking unknown words, and related behavioral characteristics
(Jennings et al., 2010; Johnson, Kress, & Pikulski, 1987).
The informal reading inventory procedure requires the examiner to choose
selections of approximately 100 words in length from a series of graded reading levels.
The student reads aloud from several graded levels while the teacher systematically
records the errors. If the student makes more than 5 errors per 100 words, the student is
given progressively easier selections until a level is found at which there are no more
than 2 errors per 100 words. To check comprehension, the teacher asks the student 4 to
10 questions about each selection.
Portfolio assessment is an alternative to traditional, standardized reading
assessment tests. The problem with standardized reading tests is that they do not measure
what students are actually doing in the reading classroom and do not closely link the
assessment to the reading curriculum. Proponents of portfolio assessment propose that
learning is too complex and assessment too imperfect to rely on any single index of
achievement.
Specifically, portfolio assessment consists of keeping samples of the students’
reading and writing work. It is relatively easy to collect samples of students’ writing
during the school year. For reading, the teacher keeps a reflective log, recording the
students’ reactions to books they read, along with the teacher’s own reactions. The log
shows the growth of each student in reading comprehension. Samples of language
experience stories can be kept in the portfolio. Other assessment methods of this type are
observations of students (“kid watching”), checklists, interviews with students, and
collections of student work. By reviewing the students’ work over a period of time,
teachers, parents, and students themselves are able to evaluate progress (Jennings et al.,
2010).
Formal reading tests can be classified as survey tests, diagnostic tests, or
comprehensive batteries. Survey tests are group tests that give an overall reading
achievement level. These tests generally give at least 2 scores: word recognition and
reading comprehension. Diagnostic tests are individual tests that provide more in-depth
information about the student’s strengths and weaknesses in reading. Comprehensive
batteries are tests with components that measure several academic areas, including
reading.
E. Strategies to Improve Word Recognition, Fluency, and Reading Comprehension
Some schools are using a measurement system called DIBELS to assess the early
reading skills of young children in grades K–2. DIBELS stands for Dynamic Indicators of
Basic Early Literacy Skills. DIBELS measures are designed to assess the young child’s
skills in phonological awareness (initial sound fluency and phonemic segmentation
fluency), alphabetic principles (nonsense word fluency), and oral reading fluency. The
intent of DIBELS is to monitor the early reading skills of young children frequently to
identify young children who are likely to have difficulty in learning to read and to
provide the appropriate intervention.
Phonics systems and phonics books have been on the market for over 70 years.
Many phonics programs today are repackaged as preprinted masters for duplication or as
CDs, recordings, audiotapes, videotapes, computer software programs, and multimedia
packages. Synthetic phonics methods first teach students isolated letters and their sound
equivalents. Then they teach students to synthesize or blend these individual phoneme
elements into whole words. Analytic phonics methods teach students whole words that
have a consistent sound-spelling pattern, and they then teach students to analyze the
phoneme elements that make up the words.
Repeated reading is a strategy used to give the student repeated practice to
improve his or her oral reading fluency. It is especially useful with slow, halting readers
who accurately identify most words in a passage but have not developed fluency. The
method involves the selection of passages that are 50 to 200 words long and at a
difficulty level that enables the student to recognize most of the words. The student then
reads the selection orally three or four times before proceeding to a new passage. Word-
accuracy rates and reading speed are usually reported to the student after each reading,
and daily practice is recommended (Jennings et al., 2010). Some students particularly
enjoy repeated reading when the passages are displayed on a computer screen. Read
Naturally is a commercial fluency and training program that focuses on fluency
development.
Predictable books contain patterns or refrains that are repeated over and over.
Many are based on folktales and fairy tales. For example, in The Three Billy Goats Gruff,
the question “Who is that trip-trapping over my bridge?” is asked by the troll as each
Billy goat goes over the bridge. Another favorite predictable book is Brown Bear, Brown
Bear. After the book has been read to young children several times, they are able to
predict the wording and begin saying the refrain along with the storyteller. Using
predictable books is an excellent way to actively involve children in a story even before
they can read. They begin to develop language knowledge and anticipate what will be
said. This experience helps develop support for word recognition when they do read the
story.
Another approach to improving fluency for students with severe reading
disabilities is the neurological impress method (Heckelman, 1969; Langford, Slade, &
Barnett, 1974). It is a system of rapid-unison reading by the student and teacher. The
student sits slightly in front of the teacher, and both read together out of one book. The
voice of the teacher is directed into the ear of the student at a fairly close range. The
student or the teacher places a finger on the word as it is read. At times, the teacher’s
voice may be louder and faster than the student’s, and at other times the teacher may read
more slowly than the student, who may lag slightly behind. No preliminary preparations
are made with the reading material before the student sees it. The goal is simply to cover
as many pages as possible within the time available without tiring the student. The theory
underlying this method is that the auditory process of feedback from the reader’s own
voice and from the voice of someone else reading the same material strengthens the
reading process.
In the read-along method, a similar process occurs. In this method, children listen
to a CD or a tape recording of a story as they read along with the text. In the classroom,
headphones may be used so that the tape recording does not disturb other children. There
are many commercial stories and tapes available for this purpose.
Basal readers are a sequential and interrelated set of books and supportive
materials intended to provide the basic material for the development of fundamental
reading skills. A basal reading series consists of graded readers that gradually increase in
difficulty, typically beginning with very simple readiness and first-grade books and going
through the sixth- or eighth-grade level. The books increase in difficulty in vocabulary,
story content, and skill development. Auxiliary material, such as teacher’s manuals and
activity books, often accompanies the books. Most basal reading series incorporate an
eclectic approach to the teaching of reading, using many procedures to teach readiness,
vocabulary, word recognition, comprehension, and the enjoyment of literature.
As the major tool of reading instruction for the past 40 years, the basal reader has
been the target of continual criticism from diverse groups, including some educators,
scholars from other academic disciplines, the popular press, parent groups, political
observers, moralists, and, recently, ethnic and women’s groups. Critics have scoffed at
and satirized the language, phonics presentation, story content, class appeal, pictures,
qualities, and environment of the characters of the basal reader. In spite of this highly
vocal and severe criticism, basal readers continue to be the major tool for reading
instruction in elementary classrooms throughout the country.
Because most basal readers are not committed to any one teaching procedure,
publishers are continually modifying them in response to the demands of the times and
the consumer market. For example, more phonics and decoding activities are currently
being added to basal readers. Other recent basal reader modifications have more
literature-based materials and language activities in the early grades. The modifications
have also made stories longer and more sophisticated and added stories that are culturally
and ethnically diverse. There are also series of readers produced especially for slow
readers.
The language experience method is well accepted as a method that builds on the
student’s knowledge and language base, linking the different forms of language—
listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This method uses the student’s own experiences
and language as the raw material. Students begin by dictating stories to the teacher (or
writing stories by themselves). These stories then become the basis of their reading
instruction.
To read effectively, readers need to have knowledge of word meanings and of the
concepts underlying the words. The more students read, the more word meanings and
language they will acquire. It is important to use strategies that will build the student’s
vocabulary and understanding of words. Knowledge of vocabulary and the ability to
understand the concepts of words are closely related to reading achievement. Limited
vocabulary knowledge can seriously hamper reading comprehension. Further, as words
become more abstract, the concepts become more difficult to grasp.
Concepts are commonly explained as ideas, abstractions, or the essence of things.
For example, the concept of chair refers to an idea, an abstraction, or a symbol of
concrete experiences. A person’s experiences may have included exposure to a specific
rocking chair, an upholstered chair, and a baby’s highchair, but the concept chair
symbolizes a set of attributes about “chairness.” The word chair allows a person to make
an inference about new experiences with chairs, such as a lawn chair observed for the
first time. The word or concept of chair by itself does not have an empirical reference
point.
At a still more abstract level, words become further removed from concrete
referents. The concept chair is part of a broader concept of furniture. Concepts even more
removed from the sensory world are ideas, such as democracy, loyalty, fairness, and
freedom. A further confusion in school learning is related to the fact that textbooks
present important concepts as technical terms, such as plateau, continental divide, density
of population, pollution, the law of gravity, or space exploration. Problems in reading in
the content areas are frequently due not to the difficulty of the words, but to the
concentration and compactness of the presentation of the concepts.
A word web is a type of graphic organizer, which is a strategy for helping build
vocabulary and making information easier to understand and learn. Word webs enrich
associations with a word and deepen a student’s understanding of important concepts.
Figure 12.6 shows an example of a word web for ice cream. A group of students
developed the word web by answering 3 questions: “What is it?” “What is it like?” and
“What are some examples?” Research shows that graphic organizers help students with
learning disabilities and related mild disabilities understand reading material and improve
their comprehension.
One advantage of the cloze test over the conventional reading test or other fill-in-
the-blank tests is that because words are deleted at random, both lexical words and
structural words are omitted. Lexical words carry primary meaning and are roughly
similar to verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. Relationships are indicated by structural
words, such as articles, prepositions, conjunctions, and auxiliary verbs. What the reader
supplies provides clues to his or her underlying language processes.
The cloze procedure may be modified and used for a variety of purposes. To teach
vocabulary, for example, only the words of the vocabulary lesson can be deleted. In
content areas, such as social studies, technical words can be deleted. Or the teacher can
delete other selected categories, such as adjectives, adverbs, or prepositions. For students
who have difficulty in writing, the cloze words can be printed on cards backed with felt
or Velcro, which students place on the appropriate blank space in the written passage. In
the sample cloze exercise shown in Figure 12.7, the reading material was retyped with
every tenth word deleted and replaced by a standard-size line. Students supply the
missing words.
Dialogue journals are a personal way to integrate reading and writing. To initiate
this activity, the teacher gives each student a notebook, and teachers and students write
personal messages to one another through the notebook. A variety of topics can be
addressed; teachers may ask students how they liked a story or ask them about their pets,
birthdays, holidays, or something that happened to them. Some teachers paste a picture, a
cartoon, or a Polaroid photograph of the student in the journal and ask for student
comments. After the student writes something, the teacher responds in the journal. The
response may provide some personal information and then ask for more information or
may start another topic. Typically, as students get used to the journal, they begin to write
more and look forward to a regular interchange through the journal.
A major reading comprehension problem for students with reading disabilities is
that they tend to be passive and to wait for teacher direction. They do not know how to
interact effectively with the text or to merge the information with what they already
know. They often read reluctantly, hesitating to ask questions and focusing solely on
what they think the teacher wants them to remember. These students may not monitor
their reading comprehension. When they are not sure of the meaning of a passage they
are reading, they do not take action by going back and trying to understand. Instead, they
continue to read and lose even more of the meaning. Often, they are unaware that
something is wrong.
Students who have difficulty with reading comprehension need instruction that
helps them become actively involved in the reading and in trying to reconstruct the
author’s message. They need to develop metacognitive abilities by learning to recognize
their loss of comprehension when it occurs and employing “fix-up” strategies. Learning
strategies for improving reading comprehension help students become active, involved
learners who are able to direct their own learning.
A collection of programs that are based on the Orton-Gillingham Method
comprise the multisensory methods for students with severe reading and learning
disabilities (Birsh, 2005). They include the Orton-Gillingham Method, Project READ, the
Wilson Reading System, Alphabetic Phonics, the Herman Method, and the Spalding
Method (Birsh, 2005; Henry, 1998). These multisensory groups have formed an umbrella
organization called the International Multisensory Structured Language Council
(McIntyre & Pickering, 1995).
The Orton-Gillingham Method is an outgrowth of the Orton theory of reading
disability (Orton, 1937, 1976). This method focuses on a multisensory, systematic,
structured language procedure for reading-decoding and spelling instruction. Initial
activities focus on learning individual letter sounds and blending. The student uses a
tracing technique to learn single letters and their sound equivalents. These single sounds
are later combined into larger groupings and then into short words (Gillingham &
Stillman, 1970; Orton, 1976).
Simultaneous spelling tasks are also part of the Orton-Gillingham Method. While
writing the letters, the students say both the sounds of the letters in sequence and the
letter names. The method emphasizes phonics and depends on a formal sequence of
learning. Independent reading is delayed until the major part of the phonics program has
been covered. There are a number of extensions and applications of the Orton-Gillingham
Method. Project READ, an adaptation of the Orton-Gillingham Method in the public
schools of Minnesota, reported significant gains in reading achievement (Enfield, 1988).
A variation of the Orton-Gillingham Method was developed by Slingerland (1976), who
offered an extensive set of materials. Another adaptation is the Recipe for Reading
(Traub & Bloom, 1978), which is accompanied by 21 supplementary readers.
The Wilson Reading System (Wilson, 1988) is a multisensory, structured
language program based on the Orton-Gillingham philosophy. It provides a step-by-step
method for teachers working with students who require direct, multisensory, structured
language teaching. The Wilson Reading System targets students who have difficulty
decoding independently, reading with fluency, or spelling words, even with the help of a
spell checker or dictionary. The program teaches students the structure of words and
language through a carefully sequenced 12-step program that helps them master decoding
and improve encoding in English. It directly teaches phonological awareness, phonology,
and total word structure, and it takes one to three years to complete. The Wilson program
is also used for adults with dyslexia.
Grace Fernald (1988) developed an approach to reading that uses visual, auditory,
kinesthetic, and tactile senses, but it differs from the other multisensory programs in that
it teaches a whole word (rather than single sounds). The student traces the entire word,
thereby strengthening the memory and visualization of the entire word. Teaching Tips
12.2, “The Fernald Method for Learning Words,” describes a method used by Grace
Fernald. It consists of four stages, but its uniqueness is most evident in Stage 1. The
Fernald Method is also effective for teaching spelling. (See Chapter 13, “Written
Language Difficulties: Written Expression, Spelling, and Handwriting.”) A Multisensory
Teaching of Basic Language Skills: Activity Book (Carreker & Birsh, 2005) provides
activities for multisensory teaching.
F. Assistive and Instructional Technology and Reading
New technology is changing the way that students with learning disabilities and
related mild disabilities communicate. Social networking websites have rocketed from a
niche activity into a phenomenon that engages tens of millions of youths, ages 12 through
17. Over 55% of online teens use social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace,
and YouTube (Roe, Stoodt-Hill, Burns, 2010; Lenhart & Madden, 2008).
Computers also offer many instructional advantages for students with reading
difficulties. Computer programs are motivating, they provide time for learning on a one-
to-one basis, they help develop automaticity, and they offer time to think about reading
passages. Computer reading programs are available for the prereading, elementary,
secondary, and adult levels.
There are several sources for obtaining recorded books on tape or on digital CD-
ROMs that are available to students with disabilities. Students who are identified as
having learning disabilities are eligible to obtain, at no cost, books recorded for the blind.
In addition, new titles can be recorded if needed. For students with severe reading
problems, recorded textbooks can be a real boon; using recorded books allows them to
keep up with content while continuing to improve their reading skills.
