The Strange Case of Reading Small Words [Premium]

The Strange Case of Reading Small Words [Premium]

A parent may notice it first in a beginning reader or an adult who finds it exasperating when trying read aloud – why is it that the “small words” are so easy to skip or misread? It is a sign of dyslexia?   The skipping or misreading of small words can be associated with dyslexia, but can also be unrelated.   ONE POSSIBILITY VISUAL TRACKING AND “READING TOO FAST” Developmental optometrists have frequently identified visual tracking abnormalities and convergence insufficiency in school age dyslexic children. This does not mean that visual issues cause dyslexia – they just suggest that they may commonly be found in this group of child and therefore contribute to word or line skips. Students who feel pressured to read fast may […]

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Reading Fluency for College [Premium]

Reading Fluency for College [Premium]

Recently we were contacted by a student who wanted to improve his reading fluency before attending college. He had completed a full course of “Wilson and Orton-Gillingham” yet his reading was still slow and effortful. He asked, “Is there anything I can do to improve my reading to help me be successful in college?”   ANSWER: First of all, good for you for looking ahead and preparing yourself for college. It is possible to get through college with slow effortful reading, but probably only if you’re competent with assistive technology and can listen to all of your books instead of reading them traditionally. Although most colleges and universities are required to make “reasonable accommodations,” schools and individual faculty members can vary, and practical issues – […]

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White Noise Improves Reading Skills and Memory in Reading Disabilities [Premium]

White Noise Improves Reading Skills and Memory in Reading Disabilities [Premium]

Some of you may remember research in the past that showed that individuals with dyslexia have more difficulty screening out background noise (discussed in the news HERE). Students or adults with this difficulty can usually request quiet area for work or test-taking under the ADA or Americans for Disabilities Act.   Now another research group has tested the effect of “white noise” on reading skills and memory recall in children with a reading disability.   From the paper: “The study was conducted with a group of 30 children with RD and phonological decoding difficulties and two comparison groups: one consisting of skilled readers (n = 22) and another of children with mild orthographic reading problems and age adequate phonological decoding (n = 30). White noise […]

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Dyslexia and Social Studies [Premium]

Dyslexia and Social Studies [Premium]

Many dyslexic students are natural storytellers and may even have a passion for history and analyzing various aspects of society and social change.   As a subject Social Studies can be difficult for dyslexic students, so the question is how to build on strengths, but bypass challenges due to extensive reading and writing demands, and rote memorization.   Dyslexic Strengths in Social Studies: Strengths in Social Studies may reflect all 4 of the dyslexic MIND strengths: spatial strengths in geography or movement of people, Interconnected reasoning strengths may allow students to see complex events from multiple perspectives and through multiple lenses. Narrative intelligence may help them immerse themselves in stories of the past and analyze decisions of different people experiencing different events. Dynamic reasoning strengths […]

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Daydreaming While Reading [Premium]

Daydreaming While Reading [Premium]

“There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.” – Washington Irving   Daydreaming holds a curious position in the areas of science. On the one hand, daydreaming has been seen as a negative, associated with inattention and poor task persistence, but on the other, associated with creative behavior and personal inspiration. Neuroscientists have taken a renewed interest in daydreaming because daydream pathways activate the default mode network, a brain network that is now known to be important for reflecting on one’s self as well as others, remembering the past, and imagining the future. Studies of dyslexic and non-dyslexic people […]

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The Way of Resilient Readers: Vocabulary and Morphology [Premium]

The Way of Resilient Readers: Vocabulary and Morphology [Premium]

There are many informal terms that have come into literature to describe “compensated” dyslexic readers. We coined the term stealth dyslexia to call attention to their pattern on psychometric tests; stealth dyslexics often had this compensated reading pattern where silent reading comprehension was much better than single word reading accuracy or oral fluency.     It’s common to see a pattern of resilient reading by dyslexic students in college or those who have been successfully remediated. Dr. Fumiko Hoeft has found that activity in the left prefrontal region seems to predict reading resilience in children (see below). Interestingly, a study by Farris et al. in the Annals of Dyslexia this year has found that strong vocabulary predicted reading resilience among college students with dyslexia. From […]

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Learning Irregular Words: Activities and Games [Premium]

Learning Irregular Words: Activities and Games [Premium]

Irregular words don’t fit the standard sounding out convention, but because they can occur commonly in text, they need additional practice to be recognized quickly.   How do you help students practice, but not be guilty of “drill and kill”? Rote memorization is also difficult for many dyslexic students so that not only is repetition inefficient, it often introduces unwanted errors. Having a toolkit of games and various activities to change up the learning practice can make the session fly by and you may be surprised how much better the information is remembered later. In the videos below, check out low tech ways to change things up and make practice more fun and less drudgery.         Because there are so many spelling […]

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Clever Ways To Practice Repeated Reading [Premium]

Clever Ways To Practice Repeated Reading [Premium]

It was in the late 1970’s that educational researchers began to question the practice of reading aloud different tasks as a way to make children more fluent readers. With this approach, every new day saw new challenges reading aloud for struggling readers so that they failed to gain proficiency, and if anything were more likely to develop a dislike or avoidance of reading. What actually showed greater success with reading fluency, was giving students repeated practice with the same passage. The general approach is to have a student or teacher pick a passage (a quote, poem, excerpt from a poem) that is 50-300 words long. The teacher or partner reads it aloud, then the student (echo reading). The goal is to have the student read […]

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Literary Analysis: Great Dyslexic Book Reviewers [Premium]

Literary Analysis: Great Dyslexic Book Reviewers [Premium]

I’m always on the look out for dyslexic strengths and advantages presented in new ways and I couldn’t help notice these two popular dyslexic book reviewers on YouTube. It’s beautiful seeing what they’re doing and there’s definitely a lot of complicated strengths that are showcased in their entertaining videos. The first example here is Merphy Napier’s literary analysis of the complicated character of Severus Snape. What an example of going deep into literary analysis and theory of mind! No wonder it’s so hard for many book-loving dyslexics (yes, they exist) to answer short answer questions. They are thinking and processing about so much. I wonder if it makes many dyslexic writers novelists rather than short prose writers. There are many paradoxes about the dyslexic mind […]

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Resources For Reading Fluency [Premium]

Resources For Reading Fluency [Premium]

Reading fluency is usually defined as an ability to read easily with little effort…with good accuracy, speed, expression, and comprehension. Reading fluency practice doesn’t take the place of decoding work, but it can be an important step that makes it likely that a person will become a lifelong reader. Strategies to improve reading fluency are many, including choral reading, echo reading, reading along with audiobooks, readers theater, sentence trees and more. As April Karl describes in the video below, reading books with repetitive text can also give student practice at reading words with a different tone.   The second video below is an example from McGraw Hill showing older students implementing practices like choral reading, Reader’s Theater, and paired reading in small groups. Some researchers […]

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