WHY SO MANY STRUGGLING READERS?

IT'S COMPLICATED...

STUDENTS WITH DYSLEXIA

Parents who have spent years reading to their child daily are often shocked when they find out their child is struggling to learn to read. You will sometimes hear that reading to your child will either prevent or fix reading problems. Reading to your child is very beneficial in terms of building oral language skills such as vocabulary and syntax, background knowledge, critical thinking skills, and comprehension – all skills that build a great foundation for learning to read. But it will take a dyslexia-specific intervention to teach your dyslexic child to read.

Experts estimate that up to 20% of children may have some of the characteristics of dyslexia that make learning to read difficult. If a dyslexic child does not attend a school where universal dyslexia screening is implemented in kindergarten (or earlier), they will likely not receive an early intervention and will quickly fall behind their peers. Many states are mandating early screening and intervention, but implementation is lagging in many schools.

The National Reading Panel (2000) identified five critical skills that should be included in reading instruction for all students – phonemic awareness (an awareness of individual sounds or phonemes needed for both reading and spelling), phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Another key finding of the panel was that explicit and systematic phonics instruction is beneficial for all students and may even prevent reading failure in many at-risk students.

PHONOLOGICAL SKILLS ARE NOT ENOUGH

As important as they are, phonological skills are not sufficient to produce fluent reading. Studies have found that over 60% of dyslexic students have a double deficit of both phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming (RAN or rapid naming). A deficit in RAN impacts a student's ability to become a fluent reader. This means that interventions that focus primarily on phonics and only secondarily on fluency training will not be able to help students reach grade level fluency. Fluency training has also been found to serve as a shortcut to reading acquisition, helping dyslexic students make greater gains in far less time than with a primarily phonological approach to intervention.

HANDWRITING FLUENCY BUILDS READING FLUENCY

Fluency training activities should include extensive handwriting instruction and practice, especially timed handwriting tasks, such as timed handwriting from dictation or timed copy work. Handwriting is often minimized in dyslexia interventions, which is unfortunate because neuroimaging studies have found that even tracing letters builds the reading circuit of the brain. Handwriting fluency facilitates reading fluency. Other fluency-based activities such as repeated timed reading tasks have also been found to improve brain connectivity and fluency. In most schools, dyslexia interventions do not prioritize fluency training and the interventions are not implemented early enough to prevent reading failure. This is a tragedy, since we now know that as early as the first grade, these children are already behind their peers in reading.

THE DILUTION PROBLEM

For dyslexic students, the explicit and systematic phonics instruction model combined with a heavy focus on fluency training should never be diluted with other reading instruction methodologies. For example, while learning to read, dyslexic students should only practice reading using decodable text which is based on concepts and word patterns they have been explicitly taught so far. But instead, dyslexic students are usually thrown with their peers into a leveled reading system that pushes them into a wordguessing habit that is very hard to break once it's established. Even non-dyslexic students can develop a guessing habit when explicit instruction isn't supported with decodable text.

The assigned levels used in leveled reading systems are based on "readability measures" rather than explicit instruction the student has received. The leveling of stories, books, and articles often relies on complex algorithms to determine reading levels. This approach to reading instruction and practice leaves dyslexic students in the dust. It is not uncommon for those in kindergarten and above to be brought to tears when they realize how far they are from reading at the levels occupied by their classmates.

There are several ways to avoid this scenario. First, dyslexia screening in early fall of PreK (or at the very least during the first few weeks of kindergarten) followed by intervention could rescue many of these students from the humiliation, embarrassment, and anxiety they begin to feel very early in their academic life.

Secondly, since leveled reading systems are especially unfair and even detrimental to the dyslexic student, they should be allowed to practice what they’ve learned using the antidote – decodable text. One criticism of decodable text is that even decodable books tend to be dull and contrived. But decodable text is only a temporary crutch, serving as a gateway to reading. With intensive work, dyslexic students, like most readers, will be able to read with automaticity, instantly recognizing the majority of words by sight, and the need to decode words when reading will diminish.

"DYSLEXIA SCREENING IN EARLY FALL OF PREK FOLLOWED BY INTERVENTION COULD RESCUE MANY OF THESE STUDENTS FROM THE HUMILIATION, EMBARRASSMENT, AND ANXIETY THEY BEGIN TO FEEL VERY EARLY IN THEIR ACADEMIC LIFE."

Extensive practice with decodable text is a temporary but necessary pathway to reading proficiency for dyslexic students. Explicit instruction and practice with decodable text is beneficial for all students, but compared to their classmates, dyslexic students need even more. Because of their brain differences in neuroplasticity, connectivity, and structure, they will need a considerable amount of repetition, ongoing cumulative review, and fluency training to internalize instruction – a process that takes more time than the regular class reading block would permit. They need daily intensive one-on-one or small group intervention outside the reading block.