Reading comprehension can be very difficult for children with dyslexia. For this reason, most dyslexia tutoring and dyslexia treatment programs focus on helping dyslexic children improve in this area. Why is reading comprehension difficult for children with dyslexia?
One of the main reasons why dyslexic children struggle with reading comprehension is because they have poor reading accuracy. Until they receive proper dyslexia treatment and dyslexia tutoring, dyslexic children tend to add extra words to sentences, leave words out of sentences, misread words, conjugate verbs improperly, and make a variety of other reading mistakes that cause them to have a poor understanding of what they are reading. When these reading accuracy issues are multiplied over an entire passage or chapter, the dyslexic student is left knowing only bits and pieces of what they just read.
Another element that cause dyslexic children to struggle with reading comprehension is poor knowledge of vocabulary. Due to the reading struggles that a dyslexic student experiences, they often do not acquire a solid base of vocabulary at the typical ages that other students do. As a result, a dyslexic child may not understand what they are reading, even if they are able to properly read the words. Many dyslexia treatment and dyslexia tutoring programs include vocabulary as one of the primary areas of focus, due to this issue.
Additionally, dyslexic children may not read for content. Since reading can be such an exhausting struggle for them, they may focus almost entirely on decoding the words they are reading, and hardly notice the information that those words are providing. Even after a child has been in dyslexia tutoring and treatment, this can still be an issue, because they have developed a habit of not reading for content. For this reason, we include reading for content as a focus area in our online dyslexia tutoring.
Anxiety may also be causing a dyslexic student to struggle with reading comprehension. Some dyslexics struggle so much that they come to associate reading with failure and humiliation, and anxiety over this causes them to have trouble absorbing the material that they are reading.
In my next post, I will discuss ways to address all of these issues.
