• Often students with reading difficulties have trouble with reading fluency, the speed and accuracy and ability to read smoothly and clearly. Students also have difficulty with phonemic awareness, vocabulary, memory, decoding, word recognition, and reading comprehension.
• Reading difficulties need to be addressed early on. Recognize students’ frustration, instructional, and independent levels and adjust the pace of instruction accordingly.
• Use student’s native language and work with their families and people from the community to develop skills in both languages. Encourage students to read multicultural and bilingual materials to connect with their individual backgrounds.
• Motivate students to read regularly to develop their phonemic awareness and reading proficiency by demonstrating an interest in reading, use materials that are well written and are related to students’ lives, give them choices, provide a comfortable environment, allow students to respond to reading in a variety of ways, and acknowledge students attempts to read as well as their progress.
• Encourage families to be involves by giving them age-appropriate, level-appropriate books and sharing instructional strategies. Communicate regularly and encourage them to be models readers at home.
• Fluency can be promoted through using choral reading, reading aloud with the students or groups of students, asking students to volunteer to read aloud, pre-teaching and previewing texts.
• Encourage students to set their own reading goals and track their progress visibly with graphs.
• Word identification skills can be developed with practice comparing rhyming words, recognizing vowel sounds by examining the surrounding sounds, recognizing parts of words that are familiar, and peeling of words by examining the prefixes, suffixes, and root words. Syllable-based reading strategies teach students how to break down difficult words. In integrated processing strategies, students draw a line under each part of the word, verbalize each part, and then read the word all together.
• With older readers, provide technological enhancements and incorporate reading into curriculum instruction. Make sure curriculum materials are age and level appropriate. Use correction techniques that are not intrusive. Encourage students to work collaboratively. Phonological awareness can be promoted using age appropriate words, poetry, and lyrics from popular songs.
• Vocabulary should be connected to students’ lives or content areas. Students can work in groups or individually to learn recognize and define new vocabulary words in their instructional materials. Teach the features of new vocabulary by visual means with graphic organizers and semantic maps. Use webs to show connections between vocabulary and related concepts.
• Storytelling and drama promote comprehension, vocabulary, and listening skills. Some students’ who come from cultures where storytelling is an important part of their tradition will benefit greatly from this kind of oral learning in the classroom.
• Cross-age or same-age reading programs develop reading skills and get students excited about reading in collaboratively groups. Discussions groups share their reactions to literature and discuss books they have read together. The groups can collaborate on projects to respond to texts in various ways.
• A balanced literacy approach combines the phonetic approach, whole-word approach, language experience approach, whole language approach to meet the different needs of the learner.
• Multisensory strategies can be used to teach letters and words such as writing in chalk, spelling the word out loud, and tracing three dimensional letters.
• Writing instruction should allow students to write for social, creative, recreational, and occupational purposes. Writing experiences should be often, interesting, and authentic. Students should write to express their opinions and share information.
• Writing groups can provide a positive situation for students to practice writing skills and share their work. They can practice editing and revising with each other’s work. Guidelines for giving each other feedback need to be set so that students can give helpful, productive, and respectful criticisms. Feedback from the teacher and other students should help the writing process, focusing only on one or two problems at a time so the student is not discouraged and frustrated.
• Word processing can be helpful to students by providing tools that highlight spelling errors, facilitate publication, eliminate handwriting problems, makes revision simple, have a thesaurus and dictionary available. Enlarged print and test reading programs help students with visual or reading impairments. Talking word processors read the text to the students so they can recognize syntax errors, spelling mistakes, and check for fluency. Some word processors have voice output systems which provide immediate auditory and visual feedback as they type.
Resources:
Improving Vocabulary Skills through Assistive Technology
Pro Teacher Directory: Lesson Plans for Storytelling in the Classroom
Inside Writing Communities
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