When Reading Isn't Easy

September 2006 Special Sections

Many adults have fond memories of their first encounters with reading—piecing together the mishaps of Dick and Jane, rollicking through the rhymes of Shel Silverstein and Mother Goose, or slowly learning to print their names. For most of us, it seems, reading comes naturally from repeating the alphabet and sounding out words. Yet imagine if those letters didn’t have sounds associated with them, or if words on a page seemed to have no meaning.

Such a situation requires no imagination for the almost three million kids nationwide who have a learning disability, and the 75 to 80 percent of them who have problems in reading- and language-based learning.

“The statistics are staggering,” says John Alexander, head of school at Groves Academy, a St. Louis Park school for students with learning disabilities. “If you don’t have the proper intervention by the end of third grade there’s only a 25 percent chance that a child will read at grade level in his or her public school career. We need to eliminate this attitude of waiting and not identifying a problem because it might be a stigma.”

Knowing the kinds of reading issues a child might face and the resources available to address them can help parents understand what they’re up against early on and get the necessary help.

Why Kids Struggle With Reading
In the world of reading disabilities, dyslexic is the word most often used to describe children who struggle to read. Characterized by poor spelling, weak decoding abilities, and a difficulty with accurate word recognition, dyslexia affects one in five school children. But in many respects, reading disabilities fall on a continuum.

One problem area can be phonological awareness, the ability to understand the way oral language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated. For example, the word “cat” is made up of three distinct sounds, each of which a child should be able to identify and separate. “For a lot of kids, this is the hardest thing to learn because they cannot manipulate the sounds in the language,” says Lori Helman, assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Minnesota. “If you ask a child to say the word ‘cat’ without the ‘c’ sound and they struggle with the task, it is clear the problem is on the phonological level.”

Phonemic awareness, another potential problem area, is the ability to understand that words are made up of  phonemes, or individual sounds, that can be blended into words. A child who struggles with phonemic awareness has trouble manipulating individual phonemes within words. Ask a child what sound the letter “m” makes, or what sound “s” and “h” make when combined requires them to associate sounds with the letter symbols of the alphabet—an impossible task for a child struggling with phonemes.

Some children have phonemic and phonological awareness but they  aren’t fluent readers—recognizing words is laborious, not automatic. “Now that the child knows phonics and can match the letters with sounds, they need to put those skills together quickly to read at a normal pace,” Helman says. “Obviously, beginning readers are slow, but if a child seems to stall out, then it’s a problem with fluency.”

If a child can’t relay the concepts of what he or she is reading, comprehension is the issue, a problem that often comes to light in the fourth grade when schoolwork requires them to read more for meaning. “All the phonological and fluency skills can be in place, Helman says, “but if a child can’t explain to you what they’re getting from the page then they aren’t getting any meaning out of what they’re reading.”