4/13/2023

Best Reading Strategies for Special Education Students

In the 2020–2021 school year, 15% of public school students were reported to be receiving special education services. Within that percentage, 33% of those students had a specific learning disability like dyslexia. As we all collectively recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is imperative that these students get the support they need during their literacy acquisition journey.

Many students have experienced some level of learning loss due to the pandemic, and accelerated learning is being prioritized now more than ever. This can be particularly hard on teachers, especially when there is a national shortage of teachers and content-area specialists. So, how can educators go about supporting special education students without stretching themselves too thin? It all comes down to implementing evidence-backed reading strategies supported by the science of reading.

What Is a Learning Disability?

Learning disabilities are defined as “a group of brain disorders that affect a broad range of academic and functional skills including the ability to read, write, listen, speak, reason, or complete mathematical tasks.” While there are certain parameters for different learning disabilities, one student’s experience is going to look completely different from the next.

In this blog, we’ll be covering some of the best evidence-based strategies to help students with disabilities strengthen their reading comprehension skills.

Reading Comprehension Strategies for Students With Disabilities

So, what exactly is reading comprehension? Gough and Tumner (1986) described reading comprehension as the product of decoding and language comprehension. This was known as The Simple View of Reading. For students with learning disabilities, comprehension can be particularly difficult. One reason for this is the difference between automatic thinking and cognitive thinking.

For example, let's say you ask two students to spell the word “car.” Student A writes down the word in two seconds and is ready to move on immediately. This is automatic thinking. Student B’s thought process might include questions like, “Does car start with a c or a k? Is the second letter an a? The last letter is an r. How do I write an r?” This is cognitive thinking, which involves actively thinking about every step in the process before acting.

According to this article from the Michigan Reading Journal, students with learning disabilities typically have to use a tremendous amount of effort to actively think about learning. They also tend to need more modeling and practice than other students. Because these students might lack the cognitive processing skills it takes to read and write, they tend to avoid doing those activities—which puts them even further behind their peers.

Provide Explicit Instruction

Explicit instruction is a key component of a Structured Literacy approach to reading, which is a term coined by the International Dyslexia Association. Students with learning disabilities greatly benefit from explicit, step-by-step instructions for every part of the literacy acquisition process—especially reading comprehension. “Explicit instruction” just means that teachers are stating exactly what is expected, defining terms, modeling, giving examples, and including step-by-step directions on the board for students to follow.

Build on Students’ Prior Knowledge

Good readers create meaning from texts by connecting new information with topics and concepts they already understand. Developing prior knowledge should occur in all stages of reading, not just comprehension, and it can be especially helpful for students with learning disabilities. Having students connect texts to their real-life experiences before, during, and after reading will help strengthen their comprehension abilities.

Have Students Identify Themes

Theme identification is a key component of early reading comprehension. For younger students, this just means asking them to determine the lesson or moral of the story they just read. As students become stronger in their reading comprehension abilities, theme identification can branch out into more complex topics. In many cases, theme identification for elementary-aged students helps build their background knowledge, which can then be applied to other texts in the future.

Use Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers serve as visual representations that assist students with identifying, organizing, and remembering important concepts from what they read. Graphic organizers come in many forms—Venn diagrams, flow charts, checklists, or mind maps—and, when used effectively, they can be great tools for students with learning disabilities. These tools highlight the most important parts of the text while eliminating extra details that students might get caught up in.

Incorporate Literature Circles

Literature circles and other forms of peer-to-peer reading activities are great ways to get students involved and excited about reading. Within these groups, students are supporting each other’s learning with teacher guidance, and each student gets assigned a role: discussion leader, vocabulary enricher, illustrator, and connector. Each group should have around four to six students, which allows those who tend to stay on the sidelines of classroom discussions to get directly involved with what they’re learning.

Before, During, and After Reading a Text

The Council for Learning Disabilities outlines what educators should do before, during, and after introducing a new text to students with learning disabilities.

Before reading, one of the best things to do is to activate students’ background knowledge. As mentioned before, students better understand and retain information when they’re familiar with it. The CLD's tips include:

1. Use specific strategies to activate prior knowledge, such as previewing headings or key concepts and making a prediction and confirmation chart.
2. Prepare and guide previewing activities to support and focus the connections students make.
3. Use graphic organizers to introduce important information, solicit prior knowledge from students, and make predictions.
4. Avoid soliciting guesses from students without guidance or feedback.
5. Keep it short. Previewing should not take longer than five minutes, especially if a teacher has limited time with students.
6. Revisit after reading to assist in reviewing, confirming, or refuting predictions, summarizing, and making connections.

Along with activating prior knowledge, explicitly teach specialized vocabulary terms for the text and ask students to predict what will happen next to get them thinking.

During reading, make sure to teach students what types of questions they should be asking, as well as how to ask them. This includes questions that have answers directly in the text, as well as questions whose answers must be inferred. It is also important to show students how to evaluate questions posed by the teacher to determine if the answer can be found in the text or if it is something they have to infer.

Along with asking questions, bringing in graphic organizers to visually show what is happening in the text is extremely helpful for students—especially those with learning disabilities.

After reading, show students how to summarize the text they just read. This should be taught in an explicit and systematic way, as teachers shouldn’t assume that students will understand how to summarize texts automatically. The CLD outlines how to do this:

1. Provide modeling, feedback, and many opportunities to practice summarization rules, such as:
   • Selecting a topic sentence or inventing a topic sentence if one is not explicitly stated
   • Using one word to replace a list of related items
   • Deleting trivial and redundant information
   • Rereading to make sure your summary makes sense
2. Teach students how to use graphic organizers to write summaries.
3. Provide examples and non-examples of summaries to help students recognize and produce summaries that contain only key ideas.

Making Reading Possible for Everyone

The vast majority (95%) of students have the ability to learn how to read, even those who have learning disabilities. The best way to ensure students find success (and even joy!) in the reading process is to lead with evidence-based strategies. This means making sure instruction is based on the science of reading.

One of the most common learning disabilities is dyslexia, which can be tricky to spot in students. Potentially 1 in every 5 students in a given classroom has dyslexia, which is why it’s so important to know what to look out for and how to best support these students. This Lexia® white paper explains how to identify the early warning signs of dyslexia, as well as how to provide effective interventions that allow for student success.