Fellow parents do any of your students present like this?. My freshman son dx’d with CAPD, ADD, inattentive type, and mixed receptive/expressive language disorder seems to have a wide disparity between reading and writing skills. His reading skills are below grade level and his writing skills above grade level. It takes him forever to read taking 55 minutes to read 5 pages. The other day though he wrote a well thought out coheisive two page story in this same time frame. The story was well thought out, flowed well, his sentence and paragraph structure was perfect, his choice of wording very age appropriatte and it was written very neatly(his spelling of course still left alot to be desired). He had no difficulty putting his thoughts down on
paper and engaging the reader in the story. On achievement testing there is a 5 year gap between reading ability and writing ability. Is this a common finding with students? I can take this to mean that his difficulty with taking notes during class lectures relates more to his auditory processing difficulties then his ability to write(states he has difficulty keeping up)? I just figured the reading and writing went hand in hand since in
the earlier grades both areas were severely behind. He has been successfully remediated for writing(minus spelling) but reading is still a struggle. His oral communication has also improved significantly to give you a better picture of his language abilities. I thought IM training would help with his speed but seems for writing speed is not an issue.
Re: do you have students like this?
Just a thought — I would suspect in this case that he is reading with very, very ineffective eye habits. No certainty, but a strong suspicion. Since writing is left-to-right by its nature, he doesn’t trip himself up. A good tutor who retrains his scanning and phonetic analysis might be able to bring that reading score up a lot very fast. This might combine well with vision therapy as well.
Re: do you have students like this?
Victoria when he was younger about age 7 he was treated for a tracking problem. He did not improve much even after the therapy. He is 14 now so it has been 7 years perhaps the therapy has improved since then? Others on the board have had good experiences with this therapy but I was leary since we did try it to no avail. How long do they recommend therapy for now? Is it expensive? The first time we did it through an optomitrist on the base. He was a brand new opt who said my son has “immature” tracking skills and some other difficulty which I forget and did exercises with him to try and improve these skills. Maybe we needed to see someone more seasoned. I will see if there is a developemental opt around here.
Re: do you have students like this?
I’m not too knowledgeable about vision therapy so I just refer people to those who know better. There’s a person who posts on this board now and then under the name “Rod”. He is a reading teacher who refers many kids to vision therapy and has had a very high success rate with a good therapist. This is an experimental field where apparently the quality of the therapist makes a lot of difference. I would suggest looking for Rod’s old posts, emailing him, and getting the phone number of the therapist he uses. If you are in driving distance you could go there, and if not you could get a personal referral to someone effective.
I am a reading teacher and I do have a lot of experience with kids of this sort in reading. Age 14 is not too late! It’s never too late, and especially at the beginning of high school you can make a huge difference.
Sit beside him with a book on the table in front of the two of you for shared reading, and glance sideways at his eyes as he reads. I would wager ten to one odds that you will be shocked at what you see his eyes doing — students like this frequently have nothing you could really call tracking at all. The eyes wander in circles around the page, go up to the ceiling, over to the window, onto your face (especially if they are trying to coax an answer out of you), over the picture in erratic jumps, and very occasionally rest on the page of reading for a fraction of a second.
You can tutor him yourself if he doesn’t resist parent help, or you can hire a tutor who is really knowledgeable about reading (Be very careful; a person with a degree in whole language will do more harm than good, encouraging the exact guessing habits that are causing the trouble.) The tutor, you or other, needs to re-teach tracking left to right. The first tool is a ballpoint pen, pointing at the word and the individual letters in the word. If the student persists in jumping around, you may need to use a file card with a small rectangle cut out of the top left corner; the student has to read the word in this corner, and you move the card along one word at a time. This is annoying at first and leads to “robot” reading with no intonation, but it’s a *first* step to get the left-to-right back in order. You sit on the student’s left and glance at his eyes, and call him back to focus when he jumps off. At first he won’t believe how much he’s doing it, but persist in multiple short sessions. Things do usually improve somewhat in as little as ten hours of work, and continued work usualy leads to great improvement.
One important point: stress on speed is counterproductive. Think of learning any other skill, from skiing to knitting to piano playing to driving a car. FIRST you get it *right*, THEN you go faster. Trying to go fast before you know what you’re doing is a recipe for disaster. Then you have to go back and pick up the pieces and re-teach, and that’s where you are now, isn’t it? Get him to slow down and track left to right and really look at each word and each sound in the word *first*; *after* you have this right then you will get a great increase in speed.
Thanks AA! The reason I asked in the 1st place is that his Lit teacher seemed to feel that this demonstrated that if my son just tried harder with the reading he would do better. He gave me the impression that a student could NOT have such reading difficulties and do so well with writing. The story in rough draft according to his teacher was better then some kids who have gone through the revision process. My son is very CREATIVE and despite all his difficulties has always enjoyed writing stories. He was in a self contained writing class in 7th and 8th grade. He was also in a self contained reading class in 7th and had a tutor in 8th but did not make as many gains with reading as he did with writing. His teacher know this history and I think he feels my son is trying to pull something because how could you make so much progress in one area and not another. Thank you for letting me know that yes sometimes this does happen even if it is the exception rather then the rule. Take care.