Common Types of Reading Problems and How to Help Children Who Have Them

Abstract

Patterns of reading difficulty provide an educationally useful way to think about different kinds of reading problems, whether those problems are mainly experiential in nature (e.g., those common among English learners) or associated with disabilities (e.g., those typical of children with dyslexia). This article reviews research on three common patterns of poor reading: specific word‐reading difficulties, specific reading‐comprehension difficulties, and mixed reading difficulties. The purpose of the article is to explain how teachers can use assessments to identify individual struggling readers’ patterns of reading difficulties, and how this information is valuable in differentiating classroom instruction and planning interventions.

Differential Effects of the Targeted Reading Intervention for Students With Low Phonological Awareness and/or Vocabulary

“…Without understanding the meaning of a word before decoding it, a child may think of the word as a nonsense word, rather than a real word with meaning and context. Assessing a student using nonsense words is a useful strategy to determine whether children know how to decode (Spear-Swerling, 2016), but providing meanings for words is a stronger strategy when teaching decoding. Thus, each TRI teacher was trained to assist the student during a TRI session in understanding a word’s meaning prior to decoding the word.…”

Supporting Elementary Students’ Reading of Difficult Texts

“…Spear‐Swerling () consolidated six profiles of struggling readers (Riddle Buly & Valencia, ) into three common patterns: specific word‐reading difficulties, specific reading comprehension difficulties, and mixed reading difficulties. We suggest using classroom‐based assessments of decoding, fluency, and comprehension to place students in one of these three groups based on their instructional needs: (1) fluency support for students with specific word‐reading difficulties, (2) comprehension support for students with specific reading comprehension difficulties, or (3) both fluency and comprehension support for students with mixed reading difficulties.…”

Matching Interventions to Reading Needs: A Case for Differentiation

“…To ascertain specific needs, we recommend administering a decoding inventory (e.g., McKenna, Walpole, & Jang, ). Students who have trouble decoding need explicit word‐level instruction (Spear‐Swerling, ); in this section, we provide some possible instructional activities.…”

“…Some have some questioned the effectiveness of RTI (Balu et al., ), and others in the field wonder if we have adopted too many “quick‐fix” interventions that simply are ineffective (see Compton, Miller, Elleman, & Steacy, ). Reading interventions are expensive, both in terms of the teacher's time and the actual cost of materials (Amendum, Amendum, & Almond, ), but despite accumulating evidence that children struggle with reading for different reasons (e.g., Buly & Valencia, ; Compton et al., ; Spear‐Swerling, ), most schools continue to group struggling readers together for intervention services.…”