Reading comprehension seems to have an endless list of skills, strategies, and instructional practices. When working with students with learning disabilities, that can feel like a daunting load of information especially if you are unsure where to start or how to identify what skills your students are missing.
Four ways to teach reading comprehension to students with learning disabilities are visualizing, making connections and activating background knowledge, questioning, and determining importance (AKA summarizing).
Although there are so many valuable strategies and skills, I have found that focusing on these four strategies allow my students to make the most improvement in their reading comprehension:
Visualizing – teaching students to create a picture or movie in their mind that changes as they get more information.
Making Connections and Activating Background Knowledge – teaching students to categorize or build relationships with new information they have read by connecting it to a personal experience, another text, or the world.
Questioning – Teaching students to independently ask and answer questions they encounter while reading a text.
Determining Importance (AKA summarizing) – Teaching students to sift through information to pull out the most important facts or details.
Below, I will discuss signs that suggest the student is missing the strategy, define the strategy, and give you a brief description on ways to teach the strategy.
VISUALIZING
How do you know if they are missing this strategy
Have you ever had a student who struggles to remember what they have read or struggle to add details to their retell or narrative? It’s likely that the student struggles with visualizing.
What is visualizing
Visualizing is when a student is reading or is being read to and they create a picture or movie in their mind about what is happening. That picture (or movie) will change as they get more information. Often it is overlooked that visualizing can include all five senses. The student can create a picture in their mind, but then they can also tell you what they are tasting, touching, hearing, and smelling.
Ideas on how to teach it
Here are some strategies to help your students learn to visualize (remember to move from basic to more complex strategies – the order may differ depending on the needs/strengths of your students):
Start with simple descriptions. “The cat sat under the tree.” Have the students each take turns describing what they see. Point out how the pictures people are creating have different details (maybe some are picturing an orange cat versus a black cat for example) but we are all picturing a cat under a tree.
Move to basic images. Have an image, for example, someone in full snow gear. Have the students visualize the rest of the details. Where is the person, what are they doing? Have them describe the details using all five senses.
Give the students a small piece of information. Tell them to visualize and describe it to their neighbor. Give them a little more information, ask them to explain how their visual changed (i.e. The dog walked. (visualize) The dog walked on the railroad tracks (change your visual). Explain that while we read we have to continue visualizing because our picture or movie changes depending on what information we have.
Have a student come up with a descriptive sentence, let another student draw, use clipart on a computer, or just verbally explain what they are picturing.
MAKING CONNECTIONS AND ACCESSING BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE
How do you know if they are missing this strategy
We’ve all experienced that moment when you ask a question and a student excitedly raises their hand to share. You call on them, and with excitement in their eyes, they make a comment that is completely and utterly off-topic. It is likely that this student is missing the skill/strategy of making connections.
What is Making Connections and Accessing Background Knowledge
There are three main ways a student can make a connection: through self-to-text, text-to-text, or world-to-text.
Text-to-self – The ability to take what they have read and connect it to a personal experience from their own lives.
Text-to-text – The ability to take what they have read and connect it to another text
Text-to-world – The ability to take what they have read and connect it to something that is happening, or has happened in the world.
How connections are made (background knowledge)
The argument can be made that accessing background knowledge and making connections are two separate comprehension strategies. However, they are so closely related it makes sense to work with them as one strategy. When a student is accessing background knowledge they are building their schema – think of this as their personal database. When students use their database (their background knowledge) and pair it with one of the three types of connections, they are able to have a deeper and more solid understanding of the new information they are exposed to.
Ideas on how to teach it
Making Connection Strategies (remember to move from basic to more complex strategies – the order may differ depending on the needs/strengths of your students):
Bring multiple items from different parts of your home and spread them out on a table. Let the students talk in pairs about what the items are used for and how they know that (making a text-to-self connection). After, have the students group the items into categories (text-to-text connection). Have them share why they grouped them.
Get an item or picture and show it to the students. Do a think aloud to show all the different ways you can make a connection in each area (self-to-text, text-to-text, or world-to-text). Answer questions such as, “What does this remind me of from home?,” “What did I feel when I saw this and why?,” “What experiences does this remind me of?,” “How is this different from my life?”etc.
Use different colored sticky notes to represent self-to-text, text-to-text, or world-to-text. Give the students one of each color. As they read through a text, or wordless picture book, have them place the sticky note (with a brief description of the connection) next to the parts they made connections with.
Give the students two columns, one labeled “When I read the part…” and the other labeled “It made me think of…” Read a picture book and have your students fill it out and make those connections. Make sure you model it first, do one together, maybe let the students do it in pairs, then try it on their own.
QUESTIONING
How do you know if they are missing this strategy
If you have a student who is unable to ask clarifying questions, doesn’t know how to recognize they don’t understand something, write sentences with little to no detail, or can only answer the most literal questions – it is likely your student struggles with the questioning strategy.
What is Questioning
When teachers hear the strategy “questioning” they automatically think, “Ya, I use questioning every day. We read a passage, I ask them questions, and they answer them using information from the passage.”
Although that is a piece of questioning, it actually is not the focus of the strategy. Questioning strategies encourage students to independently dive deeper into learning. Students who begin to understand that their questions have value and meaning are willing to be vulnerable and speak up. Listening to the questions students ask gives you vital information including (but not limited to) how the student thinks, how much background knowledge they have on the topic, what their interests are, and if they have missing skills (like correctly categorizing information or visualizing).
The struggle with Questioning
“Children enter school as question marks and come out as periods” Neil Postman
To put it simply, students (especially students with learning disabilities) don’t want to ask questions because of its dangers. They don’t want to be made fun of, they assume everyone knows the answer except them, they don’t want to be wrong. It’s safer to be quiet. If we can foster our classrooms to be a place where students have a shift from looking for the right answer to looking for the right questions and understanding there are more than one right answer, we will help our students take risks and in turn watch their learning blossom.
Ideas on how to teach it
Questioning strategies (remember to move from basic to more complex strategies – the order may differ depending on the needs/strengths of your students):
Provide your students with questioning stems to help them gain a foundation of the different types of questions out there (i.e. I wonder, who, where, what if, can, should, would they… etc.). When you model, make sure you model a wide range of questions as well.
The question game helps students practice the skill of questioning even if we have no answer right then (i.e. I wonder why air doesn’t taste). Give the students a picture, or a passage, have them each take turns asking questions. Questions cannot be repeated. If you can not come up with a different question you are out.
Break the type of questions you want them to focus on into smaller chunks (i.e. for one unit you can focus on “wh” questions, for another unit you can focus on “I wonder” questions)
Take the title of the book and turn it into a question. Have the students build a list of questions that might be answered in the book. You can also do this with subheadings
DETERMINING IMPORTANCE (AKA SUMMARIZING)
How do you know if they are missing this strategy
When you ask a student to retell a story, they should be able to give you the main pieces of it. If your student is only able to give you 1-2 details, and one or more of those details are not a key detail, it is likely your student struggles with determining importance.
What is determining importance
Determining importance is the ability to sift through information and pull out the details that make the story make sense. It’s the “need to know” parts, without all the “nice to know” parts. Some students can get confused with “what is important” with “what do you like.”
When they determine a detail to be “important” refrain from giving feedback and simply ask “why?” It may be that they just liked that part because they had a text-to-self connection. It may be they felt it was important because they accessed background knowledge that told them that part was important (i.e. she took a drink and that was important because we need water to live). Don’t ever just dismiss or tell a student they are wrong, ask them to elaborate to understand their thought process and identify what skill/strategy needs to be targeted.
Ideas on how to teach it
Determining importance strategies (remember to move from basic to more complex strategies – the order may differ depending on the needs/strengths of your students):
“Somebody, wanted, but, so, then,” is a great strategy that helps students pull out the most important information. After they read a story, the students use this outline to help them determine the most important parts of the story. They can either write it down or tell it to you verbally.
Five finger retell is another great strategy that helps them pull out the most important details. As students are retelling a story they’ve read, they put up a finger when they have determined the most important character, setting, problem, solution, and conclusion.
Wordless story books. After you have looked through a wordless picture book, discussed the story and what is happening, go back through and have the students determine the most important pieces of information on each page. There will be lots of details which gives many opportunities to determine if the details are important or not.
Categorizing. For students who are really having a hard time, it’s another great strategy to help them categorize the details in the story. You can have a category of important and “nice to know” (or whatever categories you deem appropriate). After reading a story, you can go through detail by detail and decide what category it goes under. This helps students understand that there are so many details our brains may not be able to remember them all, so pulling out the most important details (instead of all the “nice to know” details) helps our brains remember easier. They can remember the “nice to know”, as long as they get all the “need to know” details too.