Teaching Reading-Disabled ESL Students: Strategies and Tools

Introduction: Reading Disabilities and Their Consequences

There is an urgent necessity to help reading-disabled pupils develop literacy skills, since weak reading ability is linked to serious consequences. Children who fail to read properly are prone to dropping out of school and facing pervasive academic difficulties. Standard instruction does not aid most pupils who fail to grasp adequate reading skills during their early elementary years, even through the completion of schooling. Furthermore, early reading difficulties often lead to limited time devoted to text reading, causing decoding problems to grow into a generalized reading deficiency marked by poor fluency, general knowledge, and vocabulary — all of which further impair reading comprehension (Otaiba & Denton, 2015).

Reading and writing difficulties closely resemble dyslexia symptoms; in fact, dyslexic students cannot easily be distinguished from students suffering from general reading difficulties. The current era recognizes literacy skills as crucial to students' self-concept, thereby posing particular challenges for dyslexics. Compared to developmentally typical pupils, dyslexic students tend to develop an inferior academic self-concept relative to their overall self-concept. Because dyslexia affects self-esteem, children with reading and writing difficulties may develop emotional, social, and even psychiatric problems more frequently than their non-dyslexic peers (Pritima, Takala, & Ladonlahati, 2015).

Types of Reading Disabilities and Core Reading Elements

Reading skill comprises two key elements — decoding and reading comprehension — giving rise to three kinds of reading difficulties: comprehension difficulties, decoding difficulties, and combined decoding and comprehension difficulties. Research by the National Reading Panel identified five core reading elements: fluency, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, and the alphabetic principle.

Reading program instructors assert that students must feel safe and free from judgment or threat, and must be encouraged to explore and discover meaning through their own distinctive understanding. Music can be a supportive tool, as it can convey and create meaning in both the student's internal and external development and help build communication proficiency.

Challenges in Teaching Reading-Disabled Students

Several challenges arise when providing reading-disabled students with a holistic learning environment (Connor, Alberto, Compton, & O'Connor, 2014):

Students with hearing impairments struggle with grasping the auditory aspects of reading, such as letter-sound associations and phonological awareness. Intellectually disabled students face cognitive challenges that affect reading progress, difficulties that are often compounded by their placement in general education classrooms.

Valid and accessible evaluation tools must gauge every student's targeted skills and knowledge, including students whose characteristics complicate accurate measurement by conventional means. Another crucial consideration is support for identifying learning-disabled students through diverse, scientifically grounded interventions and reliable, valid assessments that can track student responses over time.

Miscue Analysis and Classroom Practice

Educators' and researchers' understanding of readers and the reading process has evolved considerably. Rather than correcting students, educators began encouraging them and emphasizing meaning construction within reading. Retrospective Miscue Analysis — grounded in linguistic miscue analysis research — invites educators to conceptualize reading as a receptive and active language process, with readers understood as language users. This constructivist approach to reading has its roots in socio-psycholinguistics, a discipline that emphasizes the powerful, dynamic links among the linguistic, social, and cognitive dimensions of language development and reading. Readers draw on their full background knowledge for decoding, predicting, and confirming meaning within text, applying syntactic (grammatical), grapho-phonic (letter-sound association), and semantic (meaning) language cueing systems (Born & Curtis, 2013).

Practical student effort was identified as the most crucial element of this approach. Educators were encouraged to implement this technique in the classroom to maximize student engagement. By charting their own progress and reflecting on their learning, students gained a sense of control over their reading development. Retrospective Miscue Analysis thus represents an effective means for students to value themselves as readers and is recommended as a reading enhancement tool for individual learners (Born & Curtis, 2013).

Students were directed to remain actively involved in the learning process and to record whatever the educator noted on the smartboard. They were asked to attend to classmates' discussions, which gave them a sense of freedom to express their thoughts and feelings — whether or not they perfectly matched individual vocabulary terms' meanings. Gradually, students began incorporating new vocabulary terms in sentences while sharing their views.

Students were placed in heterogeneous groups. To address multicultural dynamics, educators spent equal time with individual groups, creating conditions where students could openly share their perspectives. Educators paid careful attention to individual students' thoughts and ideas.

Conclusion

A large number of elementary and secondary students face word reading difficulties. Fortunately, a robust body of research documents effective word-reading instructional strategies for these students. For children with severe word reading difficulties, interventions may be demanding and resource-intensive — for example, requiring daily targeted small-group instruction over multiple years. Given the far-reaching consequences of ongoing reading failure for students and for society, such resources and efforts are fully justified. Applying research-defined tools and strategies has the potential to make a lasting difference for many students (Otaiba & Denton, 2015).

References

Born, M., & Curtis, R. (2013). (Re)Discovering Retrospective Miscue Analysis: An action research exploration using recorded readings to improve third-grade students' reading fluency. i.e.: Inquiry in Education.

Bus, A., Takacs, Z., & Kegal, C. (2015). Affordances and limitations of electronic storybooks for young children's emergent literacy. Developmental Review, 79–97.

Connor, C., Alberto, P., Compton, D., & O'Connor, R. (2014). Improving reading outcomes for students with or at risk for reading disabilities. National Center for Special Education Research, U.S. Department of Education.

Hamilton, S., & Glascoe, F. (2016). Evaluation of children with reading difficulties. American Family Physician. Retrieved from http://www.aafp.org/afp/2006/1215/p2079.html

Otaiba, S., & Denton, C. (2015). Teaching word identification to students with reading difficulties and disabilities. Focus on Exceptional Children.

Pritima, R., Takala, M., & Ladonlahati, T. (2015). Students in higher education with reading and writing difficulties. Education Inquiry.

Stanberry, K., & Swanson, L. (2016). Effective reading interventions for kids with learning disabilities. Retrieved from Reading Rockets: http://www.readingrockets.org/article/effective-reading-interventions-kids-learning-disabilities

Takacs, Z., Swart, E., & Bus, A. (2015). Benefits and pitfalls of multimedia and interactive features in technology-enhanced storybooks. Review of Educational Research, 698–739.