Parents of children with learning disabilities will often worry about how they can better help their child navigate their academic life. Thankfully, over the years, several excellent studies have been published to help both parents and educators understand the most effective reading interventions to aid students with learning disabilities. Find out some of the most effective reading interventions you would implement for kids with learning disabilities.

The Foundation of Reading Interventions

According to research performed by Dr. H. Lee Swanson, a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of California at Riverside, sound instructional practices need to be at the core of the child’s reading intervention program. These practices include daily reviews, statements of an instructional objective, teacher presentations of new material, guided practice, independent practice, and formative evaluations that test to ensure the child has indeed mastered the material. 

The study also shows that while one-on-one reading instruction has been considered optimal for students with learning disabilities, it is actually when these students receive reading instructions in small groups that a greater increase in skills was experienced. 

Effective Reading Interventions for Students with Learning Disabilities

There are a few ways students may have difficulty when it comes to reading but it can be broken down to two main components of reading: word recognition and reading comprehension. 

As teaching instructions shift from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” when students progress year levels, parents and teachers may find that kids with learning disabilities have not yet fully mastered word recognition as the standard teaching instruction would assume. This then makes reading comprehension a challenge when they try to connect what they have read to their knowledge. When choosing the right reading program for a child with a learning disability, it is important to consider the instruction model and components that are proven to be research-based effective. 

How to Improve Word Recognition Skills

When teaching young children to read, it’s crucial to link the sounds of letters to the meanings of words. As children with learning disabilities grow older, they might rely more on memorizing words by sight rather than developing word decoding and word attack skills, which connect how words sound to their meanings.

Dr. Swanson advocates for a direct instruction approach to enhance word recognition skills in students with learning disabilities. This method involves explicit and systematic teaching through drills, repetition, and practice, which can be delivered in one-on-one settings or small groups.

To effectively improve word recognition, three key components are essential: sequencing, segmentation, and advanced organizers.

In sequencing, the teacher breaks down the task, such as having the child segment an unfamiliar word into individual sounds using step-by-step prompts. As the child progresses, the teacher gradually reduces the prompts or cues. It’s important to align the difficulty level of the task with the student’s abilities.

Segmentation involves breaking the targeted skill into smaller parts and then demonstrating how these parts come together to form the whole. Advanced organizers are used by teachers to guide students in reviewing material before instruction begins. This includes directing their focus to specific information, providing background on tasks, and clearly outlining the objectives of the lesson.

Improving Reading Comprehension Skills in Children with Learning Disability

The best approach to improving reading comprehension for students is a combination of direct instruction and strategy instruction, according to Dr. Swanson. Strategy instruction is the approach of teaching students a plan to search for patterns in words and to identify key passages and the main idea in each. A student who gets the hang of certain strategies can generalize them to other reading comprehension tasks later on. 

 

When creating an intervention program for comprehension, it must have the instruction component of direct response and question. This is when the teacher asks questions and encourages the students to ask questions too. The key is for the student to engage in dialogue with the teacher. 

 

The teacher must also control the difficulty of processing the demands of the tasks and short activities. They should be available to provide assistance as needed and give a simplified demonstration for the students to follow. It is important to sequence the tasks from easy to difficult, presenting the easy concepts first and moving on to progressively more difficult concepts later on. Students should also be allowed to control the level of difficulty of these tasks.

 

Elaboration of the instruction is also quite helpful as it provides students with additional information about concepts, steps, or procedures. Teachers should use redundant text or repetition within the text as well. Employing strategy cues also help guide students. Reminding them to use strategies or multiple steps, and explaining steps or procedures for solving problems can help the students reinforce precognition and better tackle the task. 

What Works Best for the Child

Parents and teachers must work together to evaluate if the reading program works for the child. Dr. Swanson’s guidelines of the instruction components needed can even be helpful to assess any newer reading programs that become available. Parents should not be shy to ask for more information about the reading program their children are in and to speak up if they feel dissatisfied that the child’s needs aren’t met. 

 

And while reading programs are the best resources to help a child with learning disabilities, it is not a miracle cure. It takes persistence and consistent work towards reading proficiency to provide the best opportunities for the child as they grow up.