Students with dyslexia pay more attention to each sound and, in turn, fail to understand the meaning of what they read. This inadequacy in reading comprehension ability poses problems in school and a person’s life as a whole. Difficulty in developing strong vocabulary, lack of interest to read at will, and difficulty gaining employment, where reading is a requirement, are problems. Teachers should devote more time to assisting children with dyslexia in identifying and understanding new words, developing decoding skills, and enhancing their reading flow.
Reading comprehension goes unnoticed at times. However, students with dyslexia can improve their reading comprehension skills in many other ways with their teachers’ help. Reading comprehension is not only one skill, but rather, it is made up of different kinds of skills. To help teachers improve the reading comprehension skills of students with dyslexia, below we have provided them with a list of best practices.
Predictions Making
Guessing what will happen next in a story is called prediction. While it is easy for most people to make predictions in reading, students with dyslexia lack this skill. This can be due to their concentration on the sounding of words instead of understanding the meaning of the words.
Summarizing
The ability to summarize what has been read helps students assimilate and recall what they read and helps in reading comprehension. Students with dyslexia also have a hard time in this area.
Vocabulary
Two problem areas for children with dyslexia are learning and recognizing new words in print. Their spoken vocabulary may be vast, but they are unable to recognize printed words.
Organizing Information
Information coordination is another problem area of reading comprehension for students with dyslexia. These students find it difficult to organize information from written text. Instead, they depend mostly on spoken presentations, memorization, or they follow other students. Teachers can help by giving a summary before reading, using visual organizers, and encouraging students to search and learn how authors or playwrights organize information.
Inferences
We deduce more from what we read using unspoken cues. This is otherwise known as implied information. Although students with dyslexia understand the text in its literal form, they have difficulty uncovering obscure meanings and drawing reasoned conclusions.
Using Contextual Clues
Due to poor reading comprehension skills, many adults with dyslexia depend on contextual clues to understand what is read. With teachers’ help, contextual skills can be built and used to help students improve reading comprehension.
Using Previous Knowledge
To personalize a text and make it more meaningful, we instinctively draw from our personal experiences and lessons from the past when reading. This may be a problem for students with dyslexia as connecting previous knowledge to new information can be challenging. By getting the students familiar with the background information of what they are learning, introducing some key vocabulary words before teaching, teachers can activate their previous knowledge.
