Another thing you can see with students who have had a history of struggling
with reading, is as well as this capacity issue,
they may just have felt either because of the effort of decoding, or
potentially, because they are finding the content hard in terms of the vocabulary.
Children who struggle consistently with text,
start to develop a sense of, 'I am just not going to understand this'.
And so, over time, this develops into an astrategic approach,
we can say, towards text.
And you might see when you ask them to find something in a textbook,
they don't seem to have any idea of really where to start to find information or
how to mine that text effectively.
And this makes sense if we think about this child's experience.
They may have had many experiences of failure.
So it may be a fairly accurate belief that actually this is not going to make sense.
'I'm not even going to, I just don't know how to even approach the text.'
But what's happened here is that the child has lost out on developing
strategies that typically developing readers will use fairly
unconsciously when they start to develop, when they start experiencing, and
being exposed to more and more complex texts.
Where when you're presented with something challenging,
you are, at a fairly unconscious level, checking for your comprehension.
If you don't understanding something, you're likely to re-read it.
You might go back and try and work out the connection between two different things.
These things can develop fairly automatically
but in students who have had a history of struggle,
these things won't be developing, because in a way,
they don't have the confidence that they are going to be able to comprehend.
And so, in terms of helping these students,
it's really almost reprogramming them, and
helping them develop a self efficacy that actually they can.
That if we break things down into bite-size chunks,
they can comprehend and so it's helping them see, you can do this and
here are the strategies that you can use to do this.
So to recap so far, so we've said that when you've got an older
struggling reader, you may or may not see overt decoding issues.
There is likely to be some reading fluency issues, although sometimes not.
And also here, it's important to add that students may
either be reading with expression or they may sound more of a monotone.
And while we typically associate reading with expression with understanding,
don't always, I think, always check out this assumption.
Because some children kind of learn to read with expression, but
they're still actually struggling with the comprehension demands.
So, check this out.
And then finally, we've mentioned that there is going to be a group of children
where reading comprehension is a struggle.
This won't be all children.
Some children with dyslexia,
the problem does stay fairly confined to the decoding aspect.
And a strong oral language kind of buffers and
helps the bigger task of reading comprehension.
But you will have a group where, as we've said, either the sheer effort of
the decoding in fluency are detracting from the deeper comprehension.
Or as we've said, students have developed almost a defense system against texts,
and so haven't learned the strategies,
the skills readers use to navigate more complex texts.
