1% reading comprehension

It depends.

If his decoding skills are poor and he’s decoding at a 4th grade level (it’s hard to tell from your post if this is the case), then reading comprehension may be suffering because all of his attention is occupied by decoding. Improving his decoding skills might free up his attention for comprehension. The fastest way to improve decoding skills is usually a Phono-Graphix tutor. When reading fluency remains a problem after decoding skills are in place, often there is a developmental vision problem that requires vision therapy and cognitive training to improve visual processing and sequencing skills. Any of these problems can interfere with the ability to comprehend what one is reading.

If, on the other hand, he also has poor comprehension of material that is read to him, the problem is likely to be one of visualization. In this case, Lindamood Bell’s “Visualizing and Verbalizing” program or MindPrime’s IdeaChain would be the best choice. V&V can be done just with the book.

Written expression is a different area. Graphic organizers, such as Inspiration software, help with organization of ideas. Word prediction software can help get thoughts down in writing.

Nancy

Nancy, Thank you so much. I have been doing research on this and you are right on the mark. I wasn’t linking the decoding with the reading comprehension. I was just thinking processing. Thanks, Sharon

There’s a set of four books that provide short passages for reading followed by four comprehension questions (multiple choice). It’s Carol Einstein’s “Reading for Content”, available from http://www.epsbooks.com. These are very easy to do, the students enjoy them, and they are inexpensive. They are not a substitute for explicit instruction in decoding, but make a good supplement.

I have also heard good things about “Rewards” from Sopris West — suitable for older students reading on about a 5th grade level who need to improve multi-syllable word management skills and fluency, both of which would probably help comprehension. Hope to have a chance to use this soon.

Nancy

Thank you so much! Sharon

As an SLP I have seen kids who have poor decoding skills and weak vocabulary. This will definitely impact comprehension and writing…

Sharon had posted that question to help me with my son. His language function according to his neuro-psych say that his receptive and expressive language skills were intact (47th percentil; 53rd percentile, respectively). His verbal fluency was within lower end of average (25th percentile) His repetition of words while generating a word list was in the impaired range (<1st percentile) He is in 9th grade and had a bad seizure a year ago which significantly changed his testing ranges.

reading fluency when reading sentences (14th percentile)
Oral Reading quotient ( 1st percentile)
reading rate (9th percentile)
reading accuracy (5th percentile)
paragraph reading fluency (1st percentile)
spelling (17th percentile)
written expression (25th pecentile)
His IQ is high though.
His verbal scale IQ (32nd percentile)
Performance IQ (77th percentile)

The school is trying to put him into remedial language arts class because they say he may not be capable of better performance. That scares me. He is in team taught now and is supposed to be getting accomodations. In 7th grade he was on the honor roll. His doctors say he is very smart and should not be in remedial. I can not get the school to give him assistive technology, like text to voice scanning or textbooks on CDRom.
Why do the schools go out of their way to make it impossible for kids who might one day become productive adults who contribute to society, to succeed???!!!!
It seems they are more than willing to give any resource to severely disabled kids who will never do much more than they can do at present, but the kids who could actually climb out are kicked back down into the hole or desperation repeatedly.
ANY ADVICE?? thanks, brigett