Reading Difficulties

Why do some students struggle with reading?

Reading comprehension is a complex process. Students have difficulty comprehending text for several reasons:

• Some students don’t know the sounds that make up spoken words (phonological and phonemic skills) or have difficulty saying letter patterns accurately (phonic skills). These lead to word reading and spelling difficulties, or dyslexia.
• Some lack the vocabulary and other oral language knowledge that scaffolds reading comprehension.
• Others have a relatively poor self-concept as a reader. They believe they can’t learn to read and disengage from literacy.
• Some don’t transfer what they learn about reading some texts to other texts.

Interventions, then, need to cater for this range of differences.

What’s needed

Research suggests that reading comprehension could be improved by teaching:

• explicitly phonological and phonemic skills
• phonic skills
• how to improve reading fluency
• ways to enhance vocabulary
• paraphrasing
• how to visualise and summarise what a text says while reading, and generate questions
• how to use various idea-organising techniques such as concept mapping to link the ideas in the text.

Teaching the sound patterns and how to say written works is particularly useful for dyslexic difficulties.

Interventions that work

The Early Reading Intervention Knowledge (ERIK) program is an example of how research can be used to develop school-based interventions.

Developed from a large research analysis of the causes of early reading difficulties in the early 2000s, it has been used in grade 1-5 in Catholic primary schools in Victoria.

MACS has reviewed a range of currently available literacy interventions and has created a resource to showcase the findings of the review: Tier 2 Interventions in Australian Schools: A review of the evidence by Dr Kate de Bruin.

How to select the right program for your school

When a school leader is selecting a program to help improve students’ literacy outcomes they first need to ask:

• Does it [the program] match the range of ways in which my students underachieve? Students need a program that accommodates their reason for underachievement.
• Does it [the program] have multiple parallel literacy learning pathways, and doesn’t assume that one size fits all?
• Does it [the program] have explicit teaching procedures for each pathway? How comprehensive and systematic are they?
• Does it [the program] provide a means for identifying each student’s literacy learning profile and for deciding the pathway for optimal progress for that student? Or does it assume that all students will best progress by following the same pathway?
• What research supports the effectiveness of the intervention? Does it [the program] provide data that show that students of different reading profiles make progress using it?
• Is [the program] based explicitly on an accepted research theory of how students learn to read? Many programs are not based on a rigorously and extensively researched theory.

These are key issues that any school leader who is thoughtfully and responsibly selecting a literacy intervention program needs to answer.

Excerpt taken from   January 15, 2016.
Author: John Munro, Associate Professor, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. John Munro received Australian Government funding for the research on which ERIK was based in 2004. He consults periodically for Catholic Education Melbourne. He contributed to the evaluation of ERIK.

Answers to these questions may also be located in this CEM resource: Tier 2 Interventions in Australian Schools: A review of the evidence.