Reading Comprehension Instruction for Students with Learning Difficulties. By Liana Chandler (Bach EC, M.T & M Ed Spec)

Background and Purpose

Research conducted in the 1980s and more recently has suggested that children with learning difficulties struggle with reading comprehension that is the result of broadly based language problems and not limited to simple difficulties with word recognition. Since reading comprehension is crucial to school success, it is essential to understand the difficulties children with learning difficulties face as they encounter new text and to identify instructional approaches that focus on learning and using the many skills that are needed for successful reading.

This research synthesis was conducted to critically review recent contributions to the body of research on reading comprehension in students with learning difficulties with the goal of enhancing current classroom practices and identifying avenues for future research. These points serve as background information for the following discussion:

• Successful reading comprehension is correlated with oral reading fluency and vocabulary knowledge. However, interventions that focus on improving fluency or vocabulary do not necessarily increase reading comprehension, especially of long passages.
  
  
• Students with learning difficulties often show signs of giving up too quickly when faced with a difficult passage. This so-called task persistence, a skill that must be acquired by all readers, is especially important for successful reading of expository text, such as history and science textbooks, newspapers, and voter pamphlets.
  
  
• Children with learning difficulties, who have a history of academic difficulties, have documented gaps in grade-appropriate knowledge of history, geography, and other subjects. These knowledge gaps interfere with their understanding of material they encounter in new texts and compound their reading comprehension problems.
  
   
  
  Findings
  
  An analysis of three recent research reviews brings the following issues and findings to the forefront of reading comprehension research.
  
  What is the role of self-monitoring in reading comprehension?
  
  So-called active readers learn to monitor how well they understand what they are reading, as they read. When reading difficult material, these students engage in beneficial self-monitoring strategies such as rereading portions of the text and trying to figure out the meaning of unfamiliar words central to understanding it.  In contrast, students with learning difficulties often fail to realise that they must pay attention to how well they understand a text as they read so that they can go back and reread as necessary. They must learn several self-monitoring techniques, such as asking themselves questions after reading a passage or summarizing in their own words the material they've read or they might try to predict what will happen next.  Learning to make predictions helps reading comprehension.
  
  The ability to reflect on how well a reading task is progressing is a critical component of reading comprehension. Students who are taught a number of strategies to use as they read, such as asking themselves questions as they read and summarizing what they read, generally experience more improvements in comprehension than students who are taught a single, specific comprehension skill.  It is essential for students to learn "repair strategies" to use when they find themselves not understanding the text they are reading.
  
  Although students with learning difficulties can be taught to use self-monitoring techniques, it is considerably more difficult for these students to generalize these skills, or apply them to other reading situations.  Students frequently do not continue the comprehension strategies that they are taught after completion of the study unless they are asked to.  It appears that intense, long-term interventions utilizing multiple self-monitoring interventions may be the most effective approach.
  
  Students with LD process information inactively, and they have difficulty differentiating relevant and irrelevant associations. Possible solutions include techniques that force students to focus attention on the material being read and help them more readily identify the theme of a narrative.
  
  What are the contributions of text structures to reading comprehension?
  
  Skills in discerning and using text structures are important to understanding texts.  Students with learning difficulties have trouble learning about the structures of stories.  In addition, they typically recall less about stories they've read and cannot easily identify the important information in stories. The most useful text structure is referred to as story grammar, which is the way narrative texts are organized. That is, there are characters, a setting, problems, solutions to the problems, etc. Students with LD know less about narrative text structure than other students. This lack of knowledge interferes with comprehension. Fortunately, narrative text structure can be taught, and when it is, comprehension improves.
  
  Expository writing, the kind of texts found in newspapers and history books, for example, presents these students with even greater challenges. Expository writing typically contains a variety of organizational or text structures that are more difficult to identify. Thus, the tactics that may help when reading stories, such as identifying the main story elements and processing them, are often less effective with expository texts.
  
  Peer-assisted learning strategies (PALS) improve comprehension and oral reading skills.  In addition to having students reread text, PALS also has children work directly on comprehension by summarizing what they've read, identifying the most important information, and predicting what may happen next.
  
  Although peer-assisted learning has shown strong benefits, additional research is necessary to determine whether peers have the skills to explain to another student how they handle the difficulties they encounter while reading. It's clear that students can help with practice and that practice is essential for internalizing strategies, but it's not clear to what extent proficient readers can actually teach less proficient readers.