Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

A Guest Post by

Katie Stover, Doctoral Candidate

Karen Wood, Professor

University of North Carolina Charlotte

Academic difficulties are only one of the many challenges that struggling readers face daily. According to Dunston and Gambrell (2009), “In addition to changes in reading motivation … some students begin to lose self-confidence, become anxious about school and engage in activities that inhibit rather than facilitate literacy learning.”  In other words, lack of success in reading can create emotional social and emotional problems.

Students who struggle with reading can easily feel angry, frustrated, and alienated from their peers and teachers. Many struggling readers become withdrawn, unmotivated, and resistant to reading. Although they may appear shy or quiet in school, their withdrawal is often a way of coping with an environment they find uncomfortable and, in some cases, threatening.

Daily experiences often undermine their motivation, their interest in reading, and any thoughts they might have had about becoming competent readers. One example is grouping for instruction. Though not a preferred practice, teachers often sort students into groups of advanced, average, and struggling readers, and provide them with different types of instruction and materials. Struggling readers are often compared with their peers—negatively—and are well aware of the differences in instruction and materials. This awareness often ignites feeling of inferiority and inadequacy. Furthermore, because teachers have the power and authority, struggling readers may fear asking for help or speaking in class. Feelings of embarrassment and helplessness often leave them unmotivated and uninvolved in school.

The emotions felt by middle school students who struggle to read are partially determined by their experiences with peers, teachers, and parents. Teachers and parents who focus on the positive rather than the negative can energize and motivate struggling readers. Which response do you think is more likely to motivate struggling readers?

1. “Jim, you really tried. You reread the paragraphs you didn’t understand. And you got 80% of the questions right. Great. Now let’s see how we might get even more questions right.”
2. “Jim, you got 20% of the questions wrong. If you tried harder and paid better attention, you might have gotten 100% right. Progress requires effort, not laziness.”

Teachers and parents can also help struggling readers by creating a social environment that fosters success and communicates to struggling readers that they are valued as much as anyone else. Thus, teachers and parents must not blame struggling readers for their resistance or apathy to reading. Instead, teachers and parents must look beneath the surface to identify and address the sources of resistance or apathy. Typical sources are memories of failure, fear of failing, fear of embarrassment, belittling peers, babyish materials, and impossibly difficult materials. By minimizing or eliminating these sources, teachers and parents can help struggling readers develop a more positive attitude toward literacy, or a more positive literacy identity.

As a parent of a struggling reader, you may want to meet with your child’s teachers to discuss how they might help him or her by taking these actions:

1. Be conscious and aware of his feelings and emotions and how they might affect his actions.
2. Make sure she is emotionally ready for any assignment or task and that with moderate effort success is likely.
3. Develop classroom activities that include rather than isolate him and on which he’s likely to succeed. Consider collaborative assignments where students of all abilities are grouped together.
4. Ensure that the learning environment emphasizes materials and instructional activities that will likely to produce success, every day, in every class.
5. Create a supportive academic setting in which she realizes that trying new things, or “taking risks,” is valued and that she will  not be penalized or ridiculed—overtly or subtly—by her peers for any difficulties she has.
6. Give him a choice and a voice in his assignments.
7. Listen and speak to him so he learns to think of himself as a respected member of the class.

It’s important for parents to know that schools can do a great deal to motivate struggling readers who have become dismayed about reading and whose motivation to read is threadbare. By following the suggestions in this post, teachers (and at home, parents) can create and maintain a caring and trusting environment where struggling readers are motivated to become active learners whose emotional struggles and fear of reading no longer dominate their adolescent years.

References

Dunston, P., & Gambrell, L. (2009) Motivating adolescent learners to read. In K. D. Wood & W. E. Blanton, editors, Literacy Instruction for Adolescents: Research into Practice. NY: Guilford. (p. 269-286), p. 270.

Edited by Howard Margolis, Ed.D. Co-author of Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds (www.reading2008.com).