By Carol Kinlan, MEd, IECA (MA) and Dana Stahl, MEd, IECA Associate (NY)

Having a solid knowledge of reading disorders within the context of their practices is an important skill set for independent educational consultants (IECs). Understanding reading disorders helps IECs discern information contained in formal evaluations, advocate for their clients, and identify appropriate school placements.

It is essential that IECs comprehend the complexity of a reading disorder when guiding their families. Parents may offer their observations and relay what educators are reporting at school, but the role of an IEC cannot be minimalized. It is through an IEC’s understanding of learning issues and the professionals who can treat specific learning issues, such as language-based learning disorders (LBLDs), that families can find schools where effective teaching strategies are embedded in the programs and where their children can reach their full academic potential.

How to Identify and Support Students With Reading Disorders

Parents often seek an IEC if their child is struggling with school academics. Their typical request: find us a school where our student will succeed and be supported! That requires an in-depth understanding of independent schools, specifically the support services provided. More importantly, the IEC needs to understand why the student is struggling and what services and supports will be most beneficial.

As IECs who work primarily with students with learning disabilities, we are aware of the signs that a student has learning issues. In too many cases, these learning issues are not caught early enough and are frequently misdiagnosed. Why? Here are a few reasons:

• Many pediatricians are not trained to screen for learning issues

• Most early elementary school teachers are not formally trained to identify children who will struggle with them

• It is hard to tease out developmental delays from actual learning issues

• Most parents are better at spotting health problems than early signs of learning difficulties.

IECs who don’t have an LD background may not be able to interpret neurocognitive and academic assessments, examine school accommodations, or read detailed Individual Education Plans. Like other areas of specialized placement (e.g., athletics), students with clear learning challenges may benefit from working with an IEC who specializes in LD. It is helpful, however, for all IECs who work with schools to be familiar with areas of concern and the “red flags” that are frequently unidentified by parents, teachers, and IECs. Without knowing exactly why the child is struggling, a successful school placement is undoubtedly more difficult.

According to a 2018 report from the National Center for Educational Statistics (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgg.asp), 13% of school-age children will be diagnosed with a learning disability and 80% of those children will have an LBLD, which is often caused by weak decoding or comprehension skills. Knowing the following major red flags in those two areas can be helpful when working with families.

Dyslexia and Eye Tracking Weaknesses

Dyslexia is often suspected when a parent comes to us with a child who is struggling to read individual or strings of words accurately or quickly. To really identify what is going on, however, IECs must inquire about the child’s difficulty in sounding out and recalling common phonemic words, the reversal of letters after the age of seven, or the inverting of letters when writing, as well as the child expressing difficulty envisioning how to spell a word because all those symptoms can indicate weaknesses in the awareness or memory for the phonemic patterns of words.

Additional questions to ask parents in obtaining a developmental history of your client may include:

• Do any close relatives have reading problems? Dyslexia is highly inheritable.

• Did they have problems with rhyming? Recalling the alphabet?

• Did they have frequent ear infections when younger?

To complicate matters, some students can decode words nicely but are unusually slow in how they read them. Slow but accurate word identification can indicate a weakness in processing of the word. That still comes under the umbrella of dyslexia. Some children struggle with both accuracy and speed of reading, which is known as double-deficit dyslexia. When that diagnosis is made, reading will indeed be laborious on all fronts and intense, longer-term remediation may be needed. The Yale Center for Dyslexia & Creativity is an excellent early symptom resource: http://dyslexia.yale.edu/dyslexia/signs-of-dyslexia.

Occasionally, students can have weak or slow decoding due to attention issues or ocular-motor (eye tracking) weakness. The former is usually suspected when the errors are pronouns, articles, or prepositions—such as: while, he, at, it, or the—or if the student skips over punctuation or a line of text. The student may be rushing when reading and carelessly ignoring repetitive words.

Eye tracking weaknesses, although rare, may be suspected in children with good eyesight who complain that reading is causing headaches or “hurting their eyes.” When reading from left to right the eyes must be able to focus, work as a team, and provide a good peripheral vision field. Parents concerned about such symptoms should request a functional vision assessment test.

The Vision Therapy Center offers a helpful guide that explains that exam: www.thevisiontherapycenter.com/what-is-vision-therapy/diagnosis-functional-vision-test. It is imperative that parents and IECs understand that visual acuity is separate and distinct from developmental visual difficulties. Developmental optometrists are the professionals capable of discerning if children can benefit from visual therapy.

Decoding Skills, Reading Rate, and Reading Comprehension

Decoding is the practice of using various reading skills to translate written words on a page into sounds that are read aloud. When readers decode, they sound out words by pronouncing their parts and then joining parts together to form cohesive words. It may be noted that these children are unable to sound out unfamiliar words, struggle with syllabication rules, read extremely slowly, and that their reading accuracy is reduced through omissions, additions, and mispronunciation of words.

Reading rate is the speed at which a person reads a written text during a specific unit of time. It is generally calculated by the number of words read per minute, but is influenced by a number of factors, such as a reader’s purpose, level of expertise, and the relative difficulty of the text. It may be noted that these children read word-by-word instead of being able to group words and phrases together in meaningful chunks; that they rarely read with expression; and that they lack confidence and are hesitant when sounding out unfamiliar words, reducing their accuracy in oral expression. Clearly, their fluency is compromised by reduced accuracy, automaticity, and intonation.

Reading comprehension refers to a process that occurs when students can read, understand, and interpret written information. A student with reading comprehension issues struggles to make meaning out of the material that they read. It is challenging for these students to analyze the text at hand and make meaningful interpretations. It may be noted that these children can appear to read well but do not appear to grasp the meaning of what they read. Their comprehension is compromised because they are not able to interpret and analyze reading material.

As IECs increase their understanding of specific reading issues and disorders, they will be better able to guide their families and identify school placements with support services. We welcome the opportunity to continue the dialogue on this critical topic.

Carol Kinlan can be reached at [email protected]. Dana Stahl, Educational Alternatives LLC, can be reached at [email protected].