Waiting for Reading to Click? What the Research Says About Delaying Reading Intervention

When your child is struggling to learn to read, you may get the advice to “just give it time—your child will read when he or she is ready.” However, this can be a dangerous pitfall for many individuals and families that leave kids to struggle longer than necessary. Rather than waiting for reading to click, being proactive about building deficient skills is the key to helping kids gain ground. While there are developmental factors that need to be in place for kids to be ready to read and everyone achieves those at their own pace, you don’t want to delay giving your kids the support they need!

Signs of Reading Struggles

Reading struggles can present in a lot of different ways, but they are almost always accompanied by a lack of motivation, disinterest, or even blatant dislike of reading. When reading is hard or overwhelming, of course kids are going to do what they can to avoid the task at hand. This often goes along with more nitty-gritty reading struggles like:

• Trouble sounding out new words
• Forgetting common words and needing to sound them out every time
• Not being able to remember a word even if they just read it in the last sentence, page, etc.
• Poor fluency or choppy reading
• Lack of comprehension or ability to explain what they’re reading
• Losing their place visually or getting overwhelmed by too many words on a page
• And more…

Read more: Why Some Kids Struggle with Reading >>

When Reading Doesn’t Click: What Intervention Needs to Focus On

According to researcher Connie Juel in the Journal of Educational Psychology (1988), “Children who become poor readers entered 1st grade with little phonemic awareness.” While not isolated to just this one skill, researchers continue to find that a lack of phonemic awareness, phonological processing, and auditory processing are foundational elements that keep readers from progressing. 

Reading intervention should start early and start with the basics. Kids shouldn’t just be allowed to continue to fall further behind without remediating the weak skills that are keeping them from succeeding. For some kids it may be these foundational phonics skills, for others it may be weak memory, attention, or processing speed that is keeping them from grasping the concepts effectively. Whatever the case may be for your child, kids need individualized, personal, one-on-one intervention to achieve the most growth in the least amount of time.

Research on Reading Intervention (And Why You Shouldn’t Wait it Out)

You may think “well, it’s just 1st grade. They’ll catch on before it really matters.” In fact, we hear from parents often who have said their schools, teachers, or themselves thought similarly. However, struggling to grasp the foundations of reading means that they will also struggle as the reading concepts get more complex. Some students develop compensatory strategies that allow them to get by for a while, but ultimately they hit a wall and begin to struggle again.

Research has found that kids who struggle to read in 1st grade have a >88% likelihood to still be struggling by 4th grade (and later). While there are cases of “late bloomers,” it’s actually statistically rare for a child to grasp reading later in elementary school when they struggled early on.

So What Can You Do NOW if Your Child is Struggling?

Whether your child is in 1st grade and beginning their struggle with reading or later elementary, middle, or high school, it’s important to find an intense, targeted intervention that will target THEIR unique cognitive deficits that are causing their struggles with reading.

More practice is not going to make reading click. Without strong cognitive skills, even good reading instruction is not going to be what makes a difference. Instead, focusing time and energy on building their cognitive capacity for both reading and learning in general is what’s going to finally move the needle on their ability to think and learn—and read!

LearningRx offers a research-supported science of reading training program that is fully individualized, multisensory, and delivered one-on-one to help learners of all ages grow their skills and confidence in reading. In a research study of over 3,500 struggling readers, the average gain in reading skills was over 4 years (in just 24 weeks).* These kinds of gains were in kids of a variety of ages and skill levels, yet all of them came to us reporting reading struggles.

Read More: 4 Reasons Brain Training is Helpful for Struggling Readers >>

If this is the kind of growth you’re hoping to see in your child this school year, don’t wait: call us today or fill out the form linked below to get started on the journey to faster, easier reading today!

*Results are from past clients. Individual outcomes may vary.