Reading in the English Classroom

The inclusion of special students in the regular classroom, especially those who have problems with reading, is becoming quite common. How is it possible to help each student without hindering the progress of other students? What should you do if you notice a severe problem with reading in one or more of your students?

Based on my own experience, I know this dilemma is very real. I've had students in high school classes who could barely read a complete sentence, much less comprehend its meaning! This frustration led me to look for possible answers. For the next month I will be disclosing information I've found helpful. This week's article will discuss reasons behind reading problems as well as reading level and readability tests. My next article (two weeks from now) will share ways to adapt instruction to better suit students' needs.

One major concept that is necessary to realize is that all students can learn to read. By placing limitations on a student, a teacher is restricting the possibilities of learning. (This is also true for parents. Believe in your child. Don't downplay his or her abilities).

First, if all students can learn to read, then what are the reasons behind reading problems? There are of course, no simple answers. But the clues for solving the problems can be broken down into three categories: the child, the material being taught, and the instructional methods being used to teach each child.

FACTORS WITHIN THE CHILD 1. Interest and motivation 2. History of reading success and failure 3. Constitutional abilities (e.g. auditory, visual, intellectual, memory, attention) 4. Emotional level (e.g. tension, fear, frustration, embarrassment) 5. Vocabulary strength and weakness (e.g. consonants, vowels, segmentation, blending, rules, use of phonics). 6. Comprehension ability (e.g. literal comprehension, inferential thinking, prediction, problem solving, creative thinking, ability to visualize)

FACTORS IN THE MATERIAL 1. Vocabulary demands (e.g. sight vocabulary, meaning vocabulary, phonic analysis necessary for decoding) 2. Conceptual demands (e.g. experiences necessary for comprehension,thinking skills necessary for understanding) 3. Concentration demands (e.g. length of passage) 4. Structural demands (e.g. syntactic complexity, syntactic clarity)

FACTORS WITHIN INSTRUCTION

1. Strategies that work for individual children, small groups, and large groups 2. Strategies that do not work for individual children, small groups, and large groups. 3. Strategies that work with specific content 4. Strategies that do not work with specific content

Before focusing on how teachers can adapt their instruction to suit the needs of students with learning disabilities in the area of reading, we must first have the practical tools of assessing reading level as well as the readability of material.

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