Helping Students with Reading Challenges
Have the students read aloud.
What are some ways you can help students with reading deficiencies?
Tutoring is always helpful. Spending some one on one time with a student encourages the student to try harder.
I like your ideas and thoughts of how to help students with reading challenges. It is how I over came my reading challenges growing up,it was what worked for me!
Students do love positive feed back, and I try to give positive feedback all the time. Even if the student is not right I try to find the positive lining in their ideas.
What other help can you offer, Esther, when your time is limited?
Good work!
Jane Davis
ED106 Facilitator
I have every student in my class of 37 read a portion from the text every day. By doing so I engage the student and assess his/her reading ability at the same time. I also have the student explain to me what he/she has understood the reading to mean. By doing so I also assess the student's comprehension ability.
I have students with reading deficiencies read articles on topics they enjoy as a start. I have used life application to incorporate the material in class. I have them break down the material to me for understanding. This is a gradual building which requires work outside the class and small projects to monitor progress.
I return all assignments with detailed feedback on content and writing skills. If their writing skills are bad, I will suggest tutorials and additional help to get them up to speed.
In my case, when I relize the student is having reading or any other diffulctly I try to break down the subject into sections and have them do it section by section as to not overwhelm them.Afterward I will most always do a demo on the subject at hand to help clear up any issues they might have
I have used the white board with lots of illustrations when I have had students with reading deficiencies.
I would first assess to see if there is a pattern to discern - is it comprehension or the process of reading. If they can orally repeat back the knowledge then I would (gently) work to uncover if they even recognize they have a problem. If so, discuss what kind of experiences have they had in the past (positive and negative) and work to create success by engaging tutors and other resources as appropriate.
Take your time!! This is super important and something that should be focused on with the "reading deficient" learner. It is also important to "leverage" what the reading deficient learner already knows to the new material taught in the classroom.
I find that requiring a "rough draft" of a
student paper in "outline" (not paragraph) form
about halfway (time-wise) before the final paper
is due, -helps a great deal. [This "draft" is marked & returned before the final paper is due.] The "rough draft" achieves 3 goals:
(1)it forces the student to get to work on the paper and not wait until the "night before" due, (2)students are forced to "organize" the idea layoutof their paper, logically listing the main ideas in it, and
(3)they get feed-back & can incorporate changes & corrections into their final paper
I do the same thing before students get to the due date on writing assignments, including the planning stage. I think it's important to give the students guidance along the way. I assign various weights to the outlines and rough drafts so that the final mark does not come down to the final copy. I think this helps students who may have weaker writing and reading skills and therefore may be more reluctant than some other students to participate in the challenge of writing.
Greetings Stephen!
Excellent point! I think this is where admissions should act more responsibly when enrolling students with English as a second language. The goal is to ensure that students can be successful under normal/reasonable circumstances.
Good job!
Jane Davis
ED106 Facilitator
Reading is very technical and in depth medical text in our program so you have to have an excellent grasp of the English language particularly with the drugs and pharmacology that we administer. We really can't have people in our program succeed unless they have a good grasp of English at this level so this is taken care of at the front end of the admissions process.
Hi Brandon!
I am curious how you approach a student once you have realized their challenge? It's my opinion that this is the most difficult part for an instructor because we never want to treat a student like they are different.
Thanks and keep up the good work!
Jane Davis
ED106 Facilitator
Once the issue is recognized asking the student what they use for the issue sometimes keeps them in there own comfort zone, by doing this the student does not loose confidence.
