Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

He’ll probably need to master phonics and other decoding skills, but first he’ll need an evaluation from a reading specialist. The evaluation should include diagnostic teaching and observations of him in several classes. Probably, he’ll need intensive instruction from the specialist. It’s unlikely that his content-area teachers, such as his history and science teachers, have the expertise, time, or opportunity to provide the core of his reading instruction.

To help you understand your child’s problems of sounding-out words, and to get him the services he needs, we’ve listed several quotations from the National Institute for Literacy’s guide, What Content-Area Teachers Should Know About Adolescent Literacy. We’ve also commented on several of these.

Comment. Content-area teachers primarily teach specialized subjects like health, science, geography, mathematics, and social studies. Usually, they have degrees in these areas and have little or no background in reading disabilities or special education.

The Importance of Phonemic Awareness and Phonics

“Two of the skills involved in decoding or word identification are phonemic awareness and phonics. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual units of sound … called phonemes.… Phonemic awareness also includes the ability to identify and manipulate these individual units of sound…. For example, phonemically aware students can make a new word out of weather by removing and replacing the first consonant sound with another consonant sound (e.g., feather)” (p. 3).

Comment: For more information on phonemic awareness and phonics, see chapters 2 and 3 of Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds. Also, search our blog for phonics, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and reading evaluations. The search engine is in upper right corner of the blog.

“Phonemic awareness instruction is most effective in supporting reading improvement if it is provided in kindergarten and first grade…. If this awareness has not been fully developed and exercised, however, middle and high school students may experience difficulty with phonemic awareness when they encounter words that are unfamiliar to them” (p. 4).

Comment: In general, the earlier problems with phonemic awareness and phonics are identified, the greater the effectiveness of remediation and the less harm to students.

“An individual’s lack of phonemic awareness [may cause] … dyslexia. Without sufficient awareness of the sounds that make these new words, adolescent readers are unable to move to other levels of literacy, such as phonics or fluency…. Therefore, this phonological skill deserves the attention of educators in middle and high schools. Struggling with phonics negatively affects students’ reading comprehension skills, vocabulary knowledge and reading fluency. Adolescents with weak phonics skills lack effective strategies for decoding unknown multi-syllabic words” (p. 5).

Comment: Probably, problems with phonics and other decoding skills are the most common block to early success in reading

“Readers whose poor phonics skills prevent them from reading grade-level text independently cannot build their reading vocabularies at the same rate as their peers” (p. 5).

The Importance of a Reading Specialist

“Adolescents with decoding difficulties need more intensive practice and instructional time to develop their reading skills more thoroughly. Specifically, decoding instruction should emphasize syllable patterns and morphology [e.g., the units of meaning in words, such as the prefix co in cocaptain, the suffix er in farmer, the root words captain and farm]. This instruction would be, in general, most appropriately delivered by a reading specialist, and content-area instructors should focus on referring adolescent students with difficulties in phonemic awareness and/or phonics to a reading specialist for formal assessment of their reading skills” (p. 5).

Comment: As I’ve previously noted, content-area teachers often lack the time and expertise to teach reading to students with reading disabilities. Moreover, the required curriculum of their classes usually differs dramatically from the reading curriculum needed by students with reading disabilities. Making these teachers responsible for the bulk of reading instruction for students with reading disabilities is indefensible. It frustrates and harms both the teachers and the students with reading disabilities.

“For struggling adolescent students with decoding difficulties, the reading specialist should integrate phonemic awareness and phonics instruction as a support to the classroom lessons and texts that are assigned” (p. 5).

Comment: For example, the reading specialist should use the books that students with reading disabilities struggle to read in their regular classes. If, before the students’ lessons in their regular classes, the reading specialist works with them to preview the pages they’ll soon read in these classes, and also uses them to teach reading, the students are more likely to succeed when they encounter those pages. The reading specialist can also help content-area teachers choose more appropriate books and provide compensatory reading strategies to students with reading disabilities, such as using text-to-speech software, like TextAloud, that reads aloud to students.

“Phonemic awareness skills can be strengthened through instruction when introducing new vocabulary. To develop these skills, the reading specialist should provide instruction with a focus on identification of rhyming words, blending of isolated sounds to form words, and segmentation of a word into its individual sounds. While this instruction is not intended to be delivered in the content-area classroom, it could be appropriate in the English language arts class” (p. 6).

Comment: However, many English language arts teachers may lack adequate time to do this with the intensity needed by students with reading disabilities. Moreover, doing this in front of average or superior readers may humiliate those with reading disabilities.

Part 2 of 2 will discuss teaching strategies and steps you can take to increase the odds that your child gets the services he needs.

Resources

Margolis, H., & Brannigan, G. G. (2009). Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds. Voorhees, NJ: Reading2008 & Beyond (www.reading2008.com).

National Institute for Literacy (2007). What Content-Area Teachers Should Know About Adolescent Literacy. (www.nifl.gov).

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