Indicators of potential learning disabilities

As the learner reads a variety of materials, you may want to use this list to record your observations. Depending on the learner, you may want to record his or her reading and use the checklist together to record the indicators that are observed.

• Do they exhibit any pre-reading activities such as looking at the title, viewing pictures, and skimming the page?
• Is there any hesitation to begin?
• What is the level of comfort/frustration?
• Do they have difficulty tracking or do they use a pencil or finger to track (skip lines)?
• Do they ignore punctuation?
• Do they have poor word attack skills (sight vocabulary, decoding skills)?
• Do they often leave off endings or add endings, leave off or change prefixes (handling of endings, prefixes, suffixes)?
• How do they deal with syllabication (add or leave out syllables)?
• How do they deal with unknown words? Substitute? Skip them? Sound them out?
• Do they leave out or change words?
• Do they read for meaning? (i.e. if they substitute a word, does it make sense or does it look similar but have a different meaning?)
• Do they demonstrate self-correcting without prompting? ⁴