Early Reading Struggles? What the Research Says About Delaying Reading Interventions
When your child is struggling to learn to read, you may be told “just give it time, your child will read when they are ready.” However, this can be a dangerous assumption that leave kids to struggle longer than necessary. Rather than waiting for reading to click, being proactive about building reading skills is the key to helping a child 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 manifest in many ways, but they are almost always accompanied by a lack of motivation, lack of interest, 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. Getting in the 30 minutes of reading each night can be a battle. This often goes along with reading struggles like:
- Difficulty sounding out new words
- Forgetting common/sight words
- Not being able to remember a word they just saw
- 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…
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. In addition, memory is a critical reading skill for word recognition and reading comprehension.
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 Too Long)
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). Recent studies show that if kids are not caught up in reading by 3rd grade, they rarely catch-up.
What Can You Do NOW if Your Child is Struggling?
Whether your child is in 1st grade and beginning their struggle with reading or older, it’s important to find an intense, targeted intervention that will target your child’s unique cognitive deficits that are causing their struggles with reading.
More practice doesn’t hurt but does not usually drive significant improvements as that approach is not addressing the root cause. Without strong cognitive skills, even good reading instruction is not going to be what makes a difference. Instead, focusing on building their cognitive skills for both reading and overall learning is what’s going to finally move the needle on their ability to think, learn—and read!
For example, Cara ‘s son, Max, had been struggling with reading. She enrolled him at LearningRx in Savage and shared: “LearningRx has been a game changer for our son and his attitude toward school. Not only has his reading and spelling improved but his whole energy toward learning has changed and now he enjoys opening a book and learning new things”
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 r
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!
