Skill Characteristics and Strategies Chart

Reading characteristics Potential strategies
  • Engage in leisure activities other than reading.
  • Prefer more active pursuits.
  • Discuss with learners why they have limited interest.
  • Find out about other interests and begin introducing material that is related to their interests.
  • Cannot easily use materials like newspapers and classified ads to obtain information
  • Demonstrate how the documents are organized.
  • Provide reading comprehension strategies, questioning and paraphrasing and provide a step-by-step process to search the material in an organized manner.
  • Do not attempt to sound out words in reading or do so incorrectly.
  • May read words with syllables backwards (was for saw; net for ten).
  • Introduce strategies such as word-to-word matching, blending and wordpart highlighting.
  • Build a list of words that contain syllables learners read backwards. Learners can refer to this list before reading to help them watch for reversals.
  • Encourage learners to self-correct.
  • May encounter a newly learned word in a text and not recognize it when it appears later in that text.
  • Before reading, pre-teach unfamiliar but important words.
  • During the reading have learners add new words to a list.
  • After reading have learners review the words and use their own words to explain the meaning.
  • Use word-building strategies to teach prefixes, suffixes and combining words.
  • Have them build their own dictionaries of new words by listing the word, writing a brief definition, drawing a picture to illustrate the meaning and identifying an antonym or synonym for the word, if possible.
  • Read slowly and laboriously, if at all.
  • May skip words, leave endings off and make frequent repetitions.
  • May refuse to read orally.
  • Work on fluency and use a variety of cueing strategies such as background knowledge, pictures, meaning, structure/grammar and sound/symbol correspondence.
  • Build on word identification and word-part highlighting strategies.
  • Offer to read together to build confidence in oral reading.
  • Lose the meaning of text, but understand the same material when it is read aloud – visual processing disabilities.
  • Have them read the text or passage into a tape recorder and then listen to it to increase reading comprehension.
  • Introduce reading comprehension strategies for silent reading.
  • Do not understand the text when it is read to them – auditory disability.
  • Provide a copy of the material so they can follow along.
  • Help them recognize this disability and encourage them to review chapters prior to lessons if they are in a classroom format or if they plan to access further education/training.
  • When prompted to do so, do not describe the strategies they use to assist them with decoding and comprehending text.
  • Introduce the concept of strategies.
  • Teach reading and decoding strategies and work with learners to build their ability to use the strategies independently.
  • Recognize and use fewer words, expressions and sentence structures than peers.
  • Before reading, pre-teach unfamiliar but important words.
  • During reading, have learners add new words to a list.
  • After reading, have learners review the words and use their own words to explain the meaning.
  • Use word-building strategies to teach prefixes, suffixes and combining words.
  • Build personal dictionaries by listing the word, writing a brief definition, drawing a picture to illustrate the meaning and identifying an antonym or synonym for the word, if possible.