Developing Strategies for Struggling Readers
In any classroom, a number of children are fluent readers while others are struggling readers. For those who struggle, there are reading strategies that work. Because different methodologies work for different students, teachers using a combination of comprehension and decoding strategies can overcome some of the reading challenges that cause frustration for kids and their parents alike.
How Fluent Readers Use Comprehension Strategies
When fluent readers engage with a new text, they also engage their existing knowledge of the subject. While reviewing the content, these readers compare it to their foundation of existing knowledge and adjust their thinking to accommodate any new ideas they discover.
Fluent readers also monitor their comprehension as they go along, re-reading the text to make sure they understand it, pausing to examine the meaning when it doesn’t make sense, and taking steps necessary to comprehend the text. Fluent readers also use titles, subtitles, graphics and keywords to anticipate and better understand what they will read next.
Another comprehension strategy employed by fluent readers is identifying the main idea and supporting facts. Isolating the main idea makes it possible to summarizing a passage, organize facts and details, and disregard unimportant details. Summarizing helps children remember what they read.
Additional comprehension strategies:
- Interacting with the text by jotting down notes and questions, and summarizing paragraphs
- Relating the text to personal experiences
- Re-reading the parts of the text that are not easily understood
- Breaking the text into smaller, understandable chunks
Decoding Strategies To Help Struggling Readers
Different reading struggles require different approaches. Depending on a reader’s knowledge, strengths and challenges, decoding strategies may be required prior to working on comprehension. In fact, decoding is the foundation on which all other reading instruction is built:
- Fluency
- Vocabulary
- Comprehension
Decoding is an automatic process in most readers’ brains. But up to 30 percent of students do not access this part of the brain, according to The Foundation for Reading English. Decoding strategies help these readers recognize familiar words quickly and learn new words. By applying knowledge of letter-sound relationships and letter patterns, it is possible to correctly pronounce written words.
Teaching children to read by sound is one decoding strategy. Sorting pictures and objects according to the sound being taught is a good way to improve understanding. Another way to help with decoding is to read familiar text over and over to create a visual system for identifying certain words and letters.
Using pictures along with text can help struggling readers figure out what words are on the page. So can accessing children’s existing knowledge about how sentences go together. For example, ask the student what the next word probably should be, based on what they know about the subject, whether it’s dinosaurs, turtles or trees.
Additional decoding strategies:
- Phonics instruction: especially when it is explicit, systematic and multi-sensory
- Expanding vocabulary: when students learn as many words as possible, recognition of and sounding out new words is enhanced
- Analogy: involves identifying and relating information to other words with similar patterns or parts, such as street and meet
- Chunking: where students use their knowledge of word parts (prefixes, suffixes or smaller words) within larger words to decode unfamiliar text
Teaching Struggling Readers Through Decoding and Comprehension Strategies Works
Teaching reading to struggling readers often includes comprehension strategies and decoding strategies; determining which to use depends on the reader’s needs. Developing these strategies helps with instant recognition of words, which leads to reading strings of words, and then full comprehension – the goal of any reading program. These reading strategies can be the foundation on which to build a lifetime of both enjoying and comprehending any type of content.
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