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READING DISABILITIES
Methods and Resources...
Noble Academy understands that not all reading disabilities are created equally. The intervention and intentionality of instruction is directly dependent on the type of reading difficulty a student is experiencing. Students can be impacted by one or multiple reading disabilities, including dyslexia, reading comprehension and reading fluency disabilities. This page pulls together activities and teaching methods that our teachers have found successful in teaching these students.
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Additional Information
Dyslexia
Students with dyslexia have difficulty decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling). These students do not naturally recognize word reading and spelling patterns that other learners do. They labor through words and often lack the single word reading fluency required for successful connected text reading and comprehension. As young children they sometimes present with a lack of understanding of phonemic awareness which is the foundation for all reading.
For these children, direct, multisensory instruction of sound patterns and syllable types should be explicitly taught in a systematic way. Students with dyslexia heavily benefit from Wilson Reading System® instruction or other Orton-Gillingham principled programs. The ability to attack unknown words using strategies to break them apart and decipher the components is crucial to the reading process for students with dyslexia.
Reading Comprehension Disabilities
Students who seem to decode words easily and read fluently can be impacted by a disability in reading comprehension. These readers often cannot recall facts and details about what they are reading and may lack skills in inferencing, sequencing and understanding literary elements in text.
These students need to be directly taught how to recognize text structures and features, and require much repetition in utilizing comprehension strategies, such as summarizing, visualizing, questioning and predicting. Intentional targeted vocabulary instruction is also crucial to the reading comprehension process. Noble Academy teachers have been trained in selecting high utility words on the both the Core Vocabulary and Academic word lists. They equip their students with strategies to infer the meaning of unknown words and know when to stop and scaffold to support students’ understanding.
Reading Fluency Disabilities
Some students have difficulty reading fluently and with prosody (the ability to phrase and read smoothly). Although the decoding may be accurate, their reading may sound choppy or stilted. Lack of reading fluency and prosody can heavily impact comprehension even if the noted disability is not specific to comprehension.
Reading fluency interventions such as the Wilson Fluency®/Basic program or other interventions designed to address fluency, directly teaches students to preview vocabulary, focus on unknown words, participate in multiple reads of the same passage and increase fluency, prosody and comprehension by setting and working toward goals for speed, phrasing and understanding.