Strategies for Learners with an Organizational Learning Disability or for Learners Who Lack School-based Skills:

Explain what reading is like:

• Reading involves decoding. To decode, readers use sound, sight and context clues.
• To make reading meaningful, readers must make information they read link up to information they already know.
• Writers use patterns for different kinds of texts. For example, in newspaper articles the most important information is in the first paragraph.
• There are several different ways to read:
  • For general information, ie. newspapers
  • For enjoyment, ie. novels
  • For specific information, ie. text book or manual

Teach Comprehension Skills:

• Ask pre-reading questions. Pre-reading questions stimulate interest and help learners tap into background knowledge.
• Show learners how to get information about a text from titles, pictures and graphics.
• Remind learners to look for answers to “who, why, what, where, and when”… while reading a text.
• Demonstrate a “word search”. Choose a key word from a reading question and then have learners locate that key word in the text in order to find the answer to the question.
• Show learners that questions developed for use with a text usually occur in the same order as the text is written (the answer to the first question will probably be near the beginning of the text).
• Make learners aware of glossaries or indexes found at the back of books. Teach learners to find the answer to a specific question in a book by finding out where the information is using the index. Teach learners to use a glossary for finding definitions of words used in a book.

Other Strategies:

• Use spelling tricks. For example: “business”: You take the “bus” to work, don’t forget the “sin” in business, $$ - You want to earn a lot of money.
  Other spelling tricks:
  • Words that end in “ce” are nouns.
  • Words that end in “se” are verbs. For example: advise/advice or practise/practice
• Find out or observe the successful strategies learners use. Share your observations with the learner.
• Help learners understand why things happen and help them see how new information is “like” information they have.