Older Students with Reading Difficulties

What do you do when older students have reading difficulties. This article on the LD online site offers suggestions and teaching ideas. (Click here for entire article!)

Here's a portion of the article:

Most reading scientists agree that a core linguistic deficit underlies poor reading at all ages (Catts et al., 1999; Shaywitz et al., 1999). At any age, poor readers as a group exhibit weaknesses in phonological processing and word recognition speed and accuracy, as do younger poor readers (Stanovich & Siegel, 1994; Shankweiler et al., 1995). At any age, when an individual's reading comprehension is more impaired than his or her listening comprehension, inaccurate and slow word recognition is the most likely cause (Shankweiler et al., 1999).



Here are some more research sites with lesson ideas:

This article describes lesson ideas and activities to teach vocabulary and phonics.
Read here for a portion of the article on DICK AND JANE reading theory!

So, although I learned to read with the Dick and Jane series, the problem is that this approach does not seem to be as successful when students come from less literate households. In sum, the “Look-Say Method” probably would work for 80% of our population, but systematic phonics instruction seems to work to some degree for everyone.

My practical experience validates this conclusion. Teaching reading intervention students from fourth grade up through community college has helped me identify one common denominator of students who struggle with reading: they don’t know and can’t apply the alphabetic code. Diagnostic assessments almost always lead to this conclusion.

(Click here to read entire article and much more from the Penning Publishing Blog!)