Strategies for Teaching Dyslexic Students to Read

Easy Strategies for Teaching Dyslexic Students to Read | Dyslexia Best Practice Teaching Strategies

First and foremost make reading fun and meaningful! Always start by finding a student's strength, an academic domain that the students does well and with care, and acknowledge their hard work and accomplishments! This is a gift you can give to your students especially to those who are dyslexic. Dyslexia is a cognitive reading disorder and teaching LD or dyslexic students is indeed a difficult and wonderful job at the same time. We know that all teachers, even seasoned veterans need a refresher on strategies for helping dyslexic students. Teachers that are new to the professions are continuing to look for recommendations that will push their instructional skills so they will be able to help their dyslexic students read.

Happy students are smarter and more productive! 

There are easy strategies that will be especially helpful when it comes to helping dyslexic students acquire quality reading skills. Easy and common sense when teaching dyslexic students is best. Overly complex reading programs that promote phonological consciousness skills, complex vocabulary development, reading comprehension and fluency, oral reading, spelling, writing, and comprehension of written directions are sometimes hard to teach and not easy for students to use.

Stressed students are less productive and lose cognitive ability! 

LD and Dyslexia Reading Instruction Recommendations Strategies:

Before reading:

• Make Reading Fun, Exciting, Meaningful and Engaging!
• Make reading real. Read board or strategy game instructions, cookbook recipes, music lyrics and anything that will create a desire to read. 
• Show students pictures, titles, chapter names and words that are bold-faced to make a prediction.
• Relate fresh information to the previously learned ideas, opinions, facts or themes by talking about personal experience that is connected to the themes or builds background knowledge.
• Write or verbalized questions prior to reading a text.
• Prepare a keyword outline to record ideas, interesting or important keywords.
• Discuss reading strategies, structures and schemes for various types of literature, such as science, history and math. Emphasize noticeable information and key academic vocabulary that each subject addresses. Visual webs are very useful for a dyslexic student to preview and complete when they encounter new or key information.
• Pre-teach the key academic vocabulary for a specific chapter or unit before introducing a text.
• Pre-teach the themes or the background information like historical context for the readings.
• Clearly and explicitly teach the process of using the table of contents, index, glossary, sidebars, headings, caption, charts, and review the questions on the book. LD and Dyslexic students need to see everything modeled over and over. 
• Clearly and explicitly teach and model the use of tier 2 academic vocabulary, cause and effect, infer, fact and opinion, compare and contrast. Many LD and dyslexic students need a great deal of practice identifying and building skills using Tier 2 academic vocabulary.

While reading:

• Make Reading a Cherished and Valued Endeavour! 
• Offer a set of text, excerpts or textbooks for the dyslexic student to take it home and highlight on before reading in the classroom. Photo copies are perfect. 
• Allocate some time before class readings for your LD and Dyslexic students to open and explore text. I call this "Review Preview", This will help them to improve their comprehension and attention while reading.
• Provide some audio recordings to the students for them to use while they are reading the text.
• Give your student an option of what they want to read within selected genres, themes and topics.
• Let the students use text to speech software for some advanced or key information on the computer.
• Have a self-monitoring skills checklist with some questions that will make them think if what they are doing is really helpful. 
• Boost self-monitoring questions and sub-vocalization of the text.
• Train your students to read silently at different rates that depends on the purpose.
• Encourage numerous readings of the text or passage.
• Give students a keyword outline template to jot down key words, notes and key concepts when they read.
• Boost understanding of idioms and figurative/abstract language via reading scripts of everyday conversations based on Randall’s Listening Lab. The students will listen to the conversation when they are reading. Key vocabulary will be defined and highlighted in the Dyslexia Reading Instruction/Teaching.

After reading

• Make Reading Come Alive! 
• Write the answers or keywords on the board or verbalize and review the pre-reading questions and ask students to share these questions and answers with a class peer.
• Make a substitute ending to a story or write a sequel.
• Act the key scenes from a text.
• Challenge the students in drawing their conclusions and interpretations from the text.

These are just some basic strategies to help improve “LD or dyslexia reading instruction” teaching that will surely help you and your students to improve and be encouraged in learning more when it comes to their reading process.

Please add your thoughts.