Reading Disabilities – Prevention Measures

Transcript

“About preventative measures for reading disabilities. So your child may be at risk for a reading disability. Remember I talked about that delayed speech, language development and things like that. So there are some areas that we can have these red flags and we know so good preventative measures are read to your children, expose them to lots of language, read books to them, have them orient the books in the right way. Point to the words, as you read them, ask about what’s going to happen on the next page predictability. So in terms of reading comprehension and language comprehension, so reading comprehension and language comprehension go hand in hand. So the more we develop language, the more we develop exposure to good literature and good books, the more we can lay a great foundation for reading. So your child still may acquire or have a reading disability, but you’re already going to give them a great headstart in terms of helping them along the way other preventative measures.

There’s no magic pill unfortunately for reading disability. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? But there’s not. So just hard work, lots of that good research-based instruction can be very helpful as well. What’s really helpful for reading disabilities once a child has acquired the skills, but for many, you know, reading disability is lifelong. We don’t grow out of it. Unfortunately, our brain develops, we learn lots of strategies as college students, and as adults we can learn, we can read the words, we can decode them. We can understand what we’re reading, but we’re going to read at a much slower rate for the most part. So accommodations is an adult’s friend. So having more time to read that. What’s great about technology today is we can have technology that reads the books for us. Books on tape, well tape is a sort of a old word. So, so books on MP3 players or electronically based, you can even have the computer scan, your textbook or books and read it to you. So all of these accommodations can make accessing the written word much easier for readers who would otherwise be impaired compared to their peers.”