An Information-Processing Framework for Understanding Reading Disability
2014
Several years ago, when the senior author of this chapter taught in a resource room for learning-disabled children, she made a disturbing discovery. This discovery involved the reading-disabled youngsters, who comprised the majority of the children in the program. All these youngsters entered the program with poor decoding skills, but once exposed to the intensive phonic program used in the resource room, they generally learned to decode individual words with alacrity; that is, they could grasp phonic rules, memorize sounds for various letters and letter combinations, and apply the rules and sounds when reading individual words. The disturbing thing, particularly to someone who had had excessive faith in the curative powers of a phonic approach to teaching reading, was that the children continued to be poor readers. Now, however, their difficulties involved higher level aspects of reading. Their oral reading was discontinuous, effortful, and sometimes painfully slow; their reading comprehension was frequently poor; and the older children lacked the study strategies so important for success in content area subjects such as social studies and science.