As is widely understood, learning difficulties (LD) can take many forms and manifest themselves in different reading problems.  At the most severe end of the spectrum, some LD students may have acquired only minimal reading skills by high school.  They may be able to recognize a few words, but their skills are so limited that they cannot make sense of even simple continuous text.  It has been estimated that only 1% of the entire reading disabled population would fall into this category (Harris & Hodges, 1995).  Students such as these need intensive services that identify the causes of their disabilities and attempt to remediate difficulties, often through one-on-one instruction, often in a clinical setting.  In such settings, students with severe reading difficulties can get the help they need to understand the challenges of letter-sound correspondence, word recognition, and finally making sense of text.  Almost two decades ago, Allington and Johnston (1991) referred to students with reading disabilities as “children-with-different-schedules-for-reading-acquisition.”  For students with really severe disabilities, the “schedule” will indeed be long and probably marked by frustration. 

Students with learning disabilities that have not resulted in such severe reading difficulties can be helped more easily and more quickly.  Some of these students will benefit – and often relatively swiftly – from reading intervention programs that begins by identifying their weaknesses and provide intense, systematic instruction on those areas.  The International Reading Association recently published a helpful book for those attempting to make decisions about programs to use (Deshler, Palinscar, Biancarosa, & Nair, 2007). 

Instruction in an intervention program will likely begin with attention to the “basics” to ensure that students understand how to decode unfamiliar words and how to use vocabulary strategies such as morphemic analysis and context clues to derive word meaning.  Instructions will then move to comprehension strategies that students need for work in all their high school subjects.

The research on teaching reading to LD students has provided considerable information on aspects of comprehension that will be most beneficial for these students (see Gertsen, Fuchs, Williams, & Baker, 2001, for an excellent review of the research). One overwhelmingly strong finding from the research is that LD students need and benefit from systematic instruction on strategies for processing text and on metacognition, that is, thinking about what and how they are reading.

One of the most important strategies for processing text is paying attention to text structures.  LD students are often unaware of the different kinds of structures they encounter in their reading – sometimes not even recognizing the very broad differences between narrative and informational texts.  Students need to understand that most narratives will have a specific, dependable organization, the beginning →middle → end structure of the “stories” that dominated texts they encountered in the early grades.  In the more sophisticated  narratives they encounter in literature classes, the organization may be less clear-cut, as authors artfully blend in nuanced flash-backs or foreshadowing, describe characters in subtle ways, or seemingly change the meanings of common words through clever expressions of figurative language. These challenges may hinder LD students who could comprehend simpler stories.

LD students also may not know that looking for a narrative structure will not help them make sense of the expository or informational text that comprises the majority of what they encounter when the read textbooks, primary sources, or material on the Web.  There are six major text structures in expository text (Anderson & Armbruster, 1984):

• Narrative text structure, as discussed above
• Temporal sequences of events
• Explanations of concepts, terminology
• Definition – example
• Compare-contrast structure
• Problem – solution – effect or cause and effect structure

Proficient readers know that these structures are not “pure;” for example, explanations and definitions may be embedded within texts that serve many purposes.  But proficient readers also know that identifying and using the structure of texts helps them organize, understand, and remember the facts, ideas, events, and concepts that are discussed.  Students with learning disabilities are often so unaware of these structures that the task of ordering information presented in what they read overwhelms them, and their comprehension may be inaccurate or nonexistent. 

It is easy to see how this insensitivity to text structure can impede LD students in their content area classes, and it is also easy to see how information on identifying and using them can be integrated smoothly into instruction in these classes. 

Another major area of weakness for many LD students is vocabulary.  Their vocabularies as a whole may be smaller than those of their peers, and their strategies for figuring out unfamiliar words may well be weak (Beck & McKeown, 2002). Again, teachers can pre-teach vocabulary, point out meanings of words throughout instruction, and even provide direct instruction on use of textual aids like the glossaries or marginal notes included in many text books.

Another weakness may be background knowledge and strategies for using it while reading.  LD students, who have struggled with reading, have undoubtedly read less than many of their peers, so it is not surprising that they may have less well-developed stores of background knowledge for use in their content area learning.  Just as they can teach vocabulary, they can provide information to build background knowledge as introductory parts of every lesson.  As students come to realize that background knowledge about a topic makes new learning easier, they will also realize that they should be asking themselves “What do I know about this? Does this make sense to me based on what I know?” as they read new material.

Asking oneself questions as one reads is the core of metacognition, the act of monitoring the comprehension as it evolves.  Adolescents often know how to be metacognitive as they listen to others and show this by saying, “Hey, that doesn’t make sense! Explain what you mean.”  Teachers can let students know that monitoring the “sense” they are making as they read is an essential strategy for full comprehension.  Beck and McKeown (2006) offer many strategies for teaching students to do this in their aptly-titled book Questioning the Author.

Recognizing when text is not making sense is a start, but students also need ways to “fix-up” their comprehension.  These strategies can be as straightforward as going back to re-read parts of text, figuring out meanings of unfamiliar words, checking facts that contradict what one already knows, or trying to restate orally or in writing and then checking the restatement for accuracy.

Teachers, as proficient readers, model self-monitoring and “fixing” strategies by reading text aloud to their students, essentially demonstrating what proficient readers do as they make sense of text. Fielding, Schoenbach, and Jordan (2003) provide many examples of how teachers effortlessly integrate demonstrations of metacognition into content area instruction.

Will these strategies make LD students into strong readers?  Probably not on their own – but they will provide a start toward that goal because they give students insight into what proficient readers when they comprehend.  Armed with these strategies, LD students will be able to read more quickly and with more success.  They will get more information from their reading assignments, probably be able to participate more in class, and maybe even feel comfortable doing more independent reading for leisure and for learning.