Reading Instruction for Students at Risk for Reading Difficulties, including Dyslexia
I am experienced teaching students with Dyslexia and similar disabilities with systematic, explicit instruction for decoding (sounding out words) and comprehension using a multi-sensory approach.
Big Ideas Of Reading: When students struggle with learning to read, they need additional instruction that is focused on the areas causing them difficulty. These areas of beginning reading and literacy, include the concepts and principles that facilitate the most efficient and broadest acquisition of knowledge. (Carnine, 1994). The central ideas of reading and literacy are phonological awareness, including phonemic awareness; alphabetic understanding; fluency; vocabulary; and comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000).
Careful Instruction: To address students who have difficulty learning to read, Lake Oswego Tutoring focuses on the role that carefully designed instruction plays in learning to read. A focus on instructional design does in no way minimize the facts that students can differ along linguistic, neurological, experiential, and sociological dimensions. Rather, such emphasis acknowledges the very real differences that students bring to instruction and the importance on focusing on the central ideas of beginning reading and literacy.
Targeted Skills: Not all curriculum objectives and related instructional activities contribute equally to academic development, especially in reading. When students have difficulty learning to read, it is important for instruction to target the fundamental skills and strategies necessary for them to learn to read. After careful assessment, Lake Oswego Tutoring begins instruction at the correct point in the student's current reading level where remediation is required.
In-Depth, Sequential, Explicit Instruction: Lake Oswego Tutoring provides sequential, in-depth, systematic instructional activities related to the big ideas of beginning reading instruction identified by scientific research; phonological awareness, including phonemic awareness, alphabetic understanding; fluency, vocabulary and comprehension (National Reading Panel (NRP), 2000). For each of the big ideas, strategy sets target the critical skills needed for reading. For example, in one of the phonemic awareness strategy sets, blending and segmenting are targeted because these two skills are strongly related to early reading success (NRP, 2000).
Strategy Sets: Critical skills are taught in a series of strategy sets. A strategy is a general set of steps used to solve a problem. In beginning reading, problems can include learning out to decode unfamiliar words, how to read with sufficient fluency to maximize comprehension, and how to identify main ideas in narrative texts. For students who are struggling to learn to read and who are constantly trying to catch up, instruction must be carefully designed and delivered.
