Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

Guest Post by Francesca Lopez, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Marquette University

francesca.lopez@marquette.edu

We all know that reading is one of the most important skills our children need to be successful. We are familiar with how reading to our children prepares them to love to read, and how a love of reading prepares children for academic success in the long term. But what if a child has reading difficulties? How can we as parents ensure a love of reading when reading is difficult for our child?

Breevy is an inexpensive software program that can dramatically reduce the number of typing keystrokes needed to type anything. It takes one unique word that you create and turns it into whatever set of words, sentences, or paragraphs you connected with it. For me, xrdbto becomes Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds, xpe becomes Professor Emeritus of Reading Disabilities and Special Education, Queens College of CUNY. Clearly, the ability to expand one unique word into a string of meaningful words can dramatically decrease the typing burden on teachers, parents, and students with learning disabilities. Here are examples:  Read more...

From Reading & Other Learning Disabilities

A Blog by Dr. Gary G. Brannigan and Dr. Howard Margolis

What’s wrong with him? In most cases, nothing. Lots of struggling readers resist reading. After years of failure, they expect to fail; they’ve given up, they’re protecting themselves from more failure and embarrassment. From their perspective, resistance is rational. Here’s Dr. Sebastian Wren’s explanation:  Read more...

Yes. His thinking may cause him to quit, or rebel, or ignore what’s taught. This undermines learning and the growth of self-regulation, so important for independent functioning.

Because emotions and actions are often driven by conscious thoughts, we’ll emphasize some of the thought processes involved with self-regulation. But first we’ll define self-regulation, a concept that schools often ignore at the peril of children with reading disabilities. Then we’ll discuss the consequences of two common thinking patterns. Finally we’ll recommend three books to help you help your child.

Self-Regulation  Read more...

No. Think of how you’d feel if day in and day out you were frustrated. How do you act when stress is relentless, when you always feel overwhelmed, when all you expect is failure? How will this affect your mood, your optimism, your willingness to try? Chances are you’d get angry, get depressed, try to escape. Children are the same.

Morally, schools should help children, not harm them. But requiring children with reading disabilities to read lots of materials they can’t read, they can’t understand, they can’t escape from, and demanding that they succeed with these materials, harms them. It stigmatizes them. It tells them they’re failures. It creates emotional and motivational problems. It impedes progress. It creates animosity. Here’s what Lauren Leslie and Joanne Caldwell, two renowned literacy scholars, warned about frustration level materials: Avoid them.  Read more...

Many parents of children with reading disabilities worry about motivating their children. And rightly so. Their children often feel defeated, demoralized, and helpless; they no longer try—they’ve given up, they resist reading. This hurts them even more.

Unfortunately, many parents and schools fail to understand that motivational problems are complex. Mistakenly, they treat poor motivation as if it’s a solid, unmovable, impenetrable boulder. By doing this, they add to the problem—they blame the children, or they give up trying to motivate them, or both.  Read more...

Unfortunately, many children with reading disabilities feel hopeless and helpless about learning to read; they believe it’s better to give up than to try and to fail. Fortunately, schools and parents can do many things to change your child’s belief that he’s incompetent and that he’ll never learn to read.  Only by getting your child to believe he can learn if he makes a moderate effort will he begin to work at becoming a competent reader.  Read more...

If your child has a reading disability, like dyslexia, if he feels defeated, hates school, and comes home sullen and miserable and angry, Dr. Richard Selznick’s The Shut-Down Learner: Helping Your Academically Discouraged Child (Sentient Publishing, 2009) can be of tremendous help. It can help you better understand why he’s miserable or angry. It can help you to better understand dyslexia and its emotional effects. More importantly, it gives you simple, sound, and practical advice on how to help him.

Here are a few samples:  Read more...

Many struggling readers hate homework. Listening to them often tells you why: “It’s too hard…. I can’t do it…. I’m too dumb…. No matter how hard I try, I fail…. It frustrates me…. I can’t do so much homework. ”

To avoid fighting with your child about homework, to avoid assaults on his motivation and self-confidence, and to make homework a tolerable or, even better, a positive experience, you need to meet with your child’s teachers to develop a plan for improving his reading. It’s critical that the plan consider homework. By not adhering to sensible homework practices that support your child’s progress in reading, teachers may well devastate his chances of becoming a proficient reader.  Read more...

Parents often ask me to recommend a specialized school or reading program for their child, who they say has “dyslexia.” Usually, they’re surprised by my first four questions: Who told you that your child has dyslexia? On what did they base their diagnosis? How did they define dyslexia? What is it that your child has difficulty doing? The reason I ask these questions (and more) is that many private reading services, including private schools, are ideologically committed to the concept of dyslexia. Whatever the nature of the child’s reading problem, they attribute it to “dyslexia.” Rarely do they use “dyslexia” in ways that have instructional value.