Teaching Strategies for Students with Reading Comprehension Disability

1. Teaching Strategies for Students with Reading Comprehension Disability

2. Reciprocal Teaching • There are four main components to Reciprocal Teaching: • Predicting-students use context clues or background knowledge to predict what will happen in the text • Question Generating-the teacher models how to generate and answer main idea questions while reading • Summarizing-the students are taught to highlight key points in the text; this allows the students to monitor their understanding • Clarifying-students reread if they misunderstand a part of the text or find unknown vocabulary

3. Story Mapping • A schema building technique to help students improve reading comprehension. • Students are given graphic organizers to identify the key parts of a story (characters, setting, conflict) • First a teacher models how to complete a story map; then students complete story maps independently.

4. DISSECT-unknown vocabulary • Discover the content-skip the unknown word and continue reading the passage to predict what the word may mean • Isolate the prefix-are the first few letters a prefix? • Separate the suffix-check to see if the last few letters are a suffix and can be isolated • Say the stem-check to see if the stem is recognized without the prefix and/or suffix

5. Dissect (continued) • Examine the stem-If the stem is unknown complete the following 2 steps: • If the word begins with a vowel, separate the first two letters and pronounce; if the word begins with a consonant, separate the first three letters and pronounce. • If the first rule does not apply, isolate the first letter and try to pronounce again. If there is more than one vowel next to each other, practice each vowel sound and then blend together until it’s pronounced correctly. • Check with someone-students should check with a teacher, parent or peer. • Try the dictionary-if a student cannot ask for help, they should try to find the word in the dictionary and use the pronunciation key in the dictionary.

6. SCROL-help improve content area reading • Survey the headings and subheadings to see what information you will learn • Connect the segments-write key words from headings and find a relationship between them • Read the heading segment and pay attention to words that will explain what those words mean • Outline main ideas and details • Look at the heading segment to check the outline for accuracy

7. Other Strategies • Visual Imagery-students can be taught to create visual images while reading • Self-Questioning-students create questions while reading to improve recall and keep interest • Multisensory teaching-use visual, auditory, and kinesthetic approaches to the story.

8. Why use these strategies? • When students with a reading learning disability use these learning strategies, they become more engaged in the reading. They use the strategies and become more actively involved in the reading. (Mercer and Pullen, 2009, p. 276) This is helpful for students with ADHD because they will remain interested in what they’re reading for a longer period of time and won’t get bored.

9. Resources Mercer, C.D., & Pullen, P.C. (2009). Students with Learning Disabilities. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc. NCLD Editorial Team. (2014). Working with Dyslexia.http://www.ncld.org/students-disabilities/ld-education-teachers/working-dyslexia