"Joey, my 10-year-old son, struggles with reading. That's understandable. But why does he hate it? Why does he fight it? Why doesn't he try harder? He knows it's important. Why does he have such a bad attitude?

"What's wrong with him?"

In most cases, nothing is "wrong" with him. Lots of struggling readers don't like reading. Lots of them resist. Lots of them look and act like they have a bad attitude.

After years of failure, many expect to fail. Even before fourth grade, they've given up. Instead of working to become proficient readers, they work to protect themselves from more failure and humiliation. From their perspective, resistance is rational.

"Students in third grade who are still struggling with reading start to see themselves as stupid," Dr. Sebastian Wren explains. "They see their peers reading so effortlessly and fluently, and they begin to think that their peers are good readers because their peers are smarter than they are. But they don't want other people to think of them as stupid, so they try to hide the fact that they cannot read as well as their peers.

"This leads to avoidance behaviors — they avoid reading — some of them avoid it at any cost, going to extremes to avoid letting people know that they really can't read well. Some students would rather be punished and sent out of the room than have to embarrass themselves trying to read. They act out, they argue, they sulk — when they take tests, they deliberately and blatantly miss all of the questions because they would rather be seen as a problem child who just is not trying than a stupid child who just can't read."

By the third and fourth grades, many struggling readers will passively or aggressively fight reading instruction. By fifth or sixth grade, it's common for motivation, at least on the surface, to disappear. Though this severely jeopardizes their future, this makes sense.

In addition to Wren's explanation, many struggling readers know they're light years behind their peers. They believe they'll never catch up, that they'll never become proficient readers.

Often, they're right. In their current programs, they won't. Even one year's progress per year guarantees this. And many struggling readers with great potential for accelerated progress average far less progress. Long ago, Dr. Edward Kameenui warned us about this.

"Children ... behind in reading and language development ... constantly face the tyranny of time in trying to catch up with their peers, who continue to advance in their literacy development," Kameenui said. "Simply keeping pace with their peers amounts to losing."

If this is your child, now is the time to take an informed and important first step. Don't delay.

The first steps

Start by meeting with his (or her) teachers and the school's reading and learning specialists to ask and discuss critical questions. To fully discuss your questions, request an hour's meeting. After this, you may need to request additional meetings. Below are nine sample questions with important background information.

Question 1: What are Joey's instructional levels for narrative and expository reading?

Background information: When teachers teach your child to read, they should use narrative (e.g., stories) and expository (e.g., news articles) materials at his proper instructional reading levels.

At these levels, teachers work directly with your child and ensure that before instruction he easily and generally recognizes 95 percent or more of the words he'll encounter in new materials and he’ll understand 70 percent or more of what he reads. If he's anxious, he may need easier materials. Without a steady diet of materials at his proper instructional levels, he’s unlikely to make much if any progress in reading; the same is often true for his social and emotional development.

Instructional-level tasks lack statistical guidance as each task can be considerably different, as different as checking correct answers versus writing lengthy compositions. Joey may do well on the checking, but find it impossible to write even one cogent paragraph. Thus, tasks lack specific statistical guidelines. The key to choosing tasks is to monitor the kinds on which different struggling readers do well and feel satisfied and the kinds on which they struggle and feel anxious.

When choosing tasks, it’s important to ensure that the changeable characteristics below, called variables, are doable for the struggling readers, so the variables don’t accidentally sabotage success. Each variable, as it relates to the task, is important. Problems with just one of the variables below can provoke frustration, “failure,” and grief. Thus, for each struggling reader, it’s critical to assess:

  • The length of the task
  • The complexity of the task
  • The environmental distractions
  • The task’s cognitive demands
  • The task’s physical demands
  • The relevance and interest of the task
  • The stress and anxiety the task provokes
  • His relationships with his teacher(s) and parents
  • The available support and his expectation of support
  • The friendliness and cooperation of the group’s members
  • His self-control, including fatigue, attention and habits
  • The socialization and enjoyment he associates with the task
  • His expectations of success or failure, satisfaction or disappointment, gain or loss
  • His motivation, including self-efficacy, personal goals, peer-influence and reinforcement

Question 2: What are Joey's independent reading levels, like his narrative and expository levels for homework?

Background information: Whenever your child reads materials independently, his teachers should make sure they assign narrative and expository materials at his proper independent reading levels. "Independent" means he works alone, without teacher involvement or guidance.

The two key words are alone and without. Thus, he needs to be well prepared to succeed independently.

Without help, he should typically recognize 99 percent of the words he encounters in new narrative and expository materials and understand 90 percent or more of what he reads. In other words, he should not struggle to recognize words or to understand what he's reading. Instead, he should be able to focus on and effectively respond to the material's underlying concepts.

Narrative and expository homework should always be at this level. In all likelihood, more difficult work, like instructional-level work that he's required to work on independently, will frustrate him. If he clings to hopes of becoming a proficient reader, a steady diet of frustrating work may well destroy them.

Question 3: At home, reading upsets Joey. He resists it. How do you prevent him from becoming frustrated with reading?

Background information: Routinely requiring struggling readers to master frustration level materials is a common but destructive practice. It’s a major, often insurmountable roadblock to helping them become highly motivated, highly enthusiastic readers. Often, it causes great emotional distress and active resistance to reading.

Unless Joey volunteers, his teachers should never ask him to read frustration level materials. At this level, children stumble and toil with words, recognizing fewer than 90% of them and understanding less than 70% of what they read. Their reading fluency is poor. But many of them learn two things — to hate reading, to give up.

Question 4: We need to accelerate Joey's progress in reading. How do I formally request that the school or district’s reading specialist comprehensively evaluate his reading abilities and needs?

Background information: Accurately identifying the instructional, independent and frustration levels is only one part of identifying the roadblocks to progress. Frequently, reading specialists can identify many other roadblocks.

They can suggest ways to minimize or eliminate them, provide valid ways to monitor progress, suggest research-based ways to modify ineffective programs and help teachers develop necessary competencies. This will help Joey and his teacher now. In the future, the teacher's new knowledge and skill will help many struggling learners.

Usually, when your child struggles with reading, the best starting point is a comprehensive reading evaluation. As Ekwall and Shanker advocated some 28 years ago, "A thorough [reading] diagnosis is a prerequisite for the beginning remedial program." As recently as 2016, the Learning Disabilities Association of America (LDA) stressed the need for providing a proper diagnosis to each struggling reader.

"Personalized learning is a catch phrase that covers lots of territory in the classroom, but for a student with learning disabilities a formal diagnosis is vital to get the specific supports needed," the LDA wrote (italics added).

To me, anything less is a blindfolded effort that shrinks the odds of success.

Given the need for a formal diagnosis, parents should formally submit a written request for a comprehensive reading evaluation to the proper school authorities. They should also submit a list of questions that the evaluation should answer. Relevant questions can dramatically improve evaluations. Here are five sample questions:

  • In class and in diagnostic reading instruction, what reading strategies and practices have produced the most and the least success for Joey?
  • What can Joey's teachers do to accelerate his progress without fundamentally modifying their typical instructional routines?
  • How can we reliably and validly measure Joey's ongoing progress so we'll quickly know if his instruction is or isn't accelerating his reading progress and strengthening his motivation for reading?
  • How much daily instructional time should the school devote to Joey's reading instruction and how should the time be organized to ensure Joey's alertness and interest?
  • Since the federal government's What Works Clearing House has found that knowledgeable and skilled individual tutoring is one of the few interventions with strong research support for overcoming reading disabilities, what are the specific reasons for providing or not providing Joey with such daily tutoring?

Quality schools that care about struggling readers will provide relevant and comprehensive evaluations that answer your questions. Other types of schools may resist or provide superficial evaluations.

Question 5: Because Joey resists reading, but otherwise has a great deal of intellectual curiosity, how can the school arrange for a knowledgeable and skilled person to read aloud to him daily, using intellectually challenging materials that he enjoys and is comfortable with?

Background information: Each day your child should listen to someone read interesting materials that he can readily understand, followed by lively, interesting discussions about them. Keep in mind that discussions are not quizzes.

Such activities help to accomplish two goals. They tell struggling readers that the school respects and wants to stimulate their intellectual competency. Both messages help to weaken any "I'm stupid" beliefs that haunt struggling readers.

Question 6: What's being done daily to encourage Joey to read lots materials that stimulate his interest in reading and avoid feelings of 'stupidity' and embarrassment?

Background information: Each day your child should read and discuss lots of instructional or independent level materials that motivate him to read. Both the ease of the materials and the topics should make reading interesting to struggling readers, which often encourages them to read more, which strengthens their skills.

Lots of easy, interesting reading gives them practice with word recognition, strengthening their decoding skills, sight vocabulary and fluency. Easy, interesting reading can also help them extend old concepts and develop new ones, while increasing their vocabularies.

Question 7: Joey believes he'll always fail and humiliate himself in front of his friends. At home, when he stumbles on words, he screams 'I'm stupid. Just stupid.' So, how can you and the school's other professionals reverse this?

Background information: Reading, writing and looking competent are three of education and society's primary currencies. Poverty is both unacceptable and humiliating. By third grade, countless struggling readers tend to know this. By fourth grade, there's rarely a doubt.

It's the school's job to teach children to read and to motivate them to do so. For struggling readers, poor motivation equals poor progress. Often, to reverse this requires schools to help them develop realistic optimism, the accurate belief that: "If I'm given instructional or independent level tasks and materials, I can succeed if I make the effort, persevere when necessary, and correctly use the right strategies."

In many ways, this is part of the educational description for strengthening self-efficacy.

Though the term "self-efficacy" may sound like an abstract, unimportant concept dreamed up by ivy league professors, it's not. It’s real, it’s functional, it’s important, it effects motivation, effort and achievement:

"Self-efficacy…influence[s] task choice, effort, persistence, and achievement. Compared with students who doubt their learning capacities, those who have a sense of efficacy for [particular tasks] participate more readily, work harder, persist longer when they encounter difficulties, and achieve at a higher level…. Students do not engage in activities they believe will lead to negative outcomes," according to Schunk and Zimmerman.

Once, I was one of those kids who believed I'd always strike out. As I wrote in Educational Leadership, it was a painful experience: "As a kid in Brooklyn, I struggled to play baseball. I wanted to be great, to get lots of hits — but time after time, I struck out. I heard the comments ('He stinks!'), and no one wanted a sure 'out' like me on their team, even if I had the only bat and ball. I felt hopeless. So I did the rational thing: I stopped trying."

Schools and parents can help many struggling readers develop accurate, productive levels of self-efficacy, which can accelerate progress. They can achieve this by harnessing one or a combination of these and related instructional approaches:

1. Show struggling readers how their new tasks or materials are similar to ones on which they recently succeed. Essentially, you want them to think, "I've done this before. I succeeded. I know the steps. I can do it again.”

2. Model and teach struggling readers how to tell themselves why they succeeded or did a poor job. As you read the attribution examples below, notice that the struggling readers can control all the factors, but only if the tasks and materials are at their right instructional and independent levels.

By watching and listening to you, and by practicing the right attributions, struggling readers can learn to tell themselves, "I succeeded because I made a good effort. I stuck to it, and I followed the steps on my cue cards."

Similarly, they can tell themselves why their performance was poor, and how they can improve it. "I struck out because I didn’t pay attention and make a good effort. I didn’t stick to it. I didn’t follow the steps on my cue cards. But next period I’ll do all of these and I’ll succeed."

Question 8: Giving my son the right instructional and independent level tasks and materials hasn't been enough. He needs a reward system. What can the school do to make rewards into an effective program?

Background information: If your child resists reading, if he will not read without strong, immediate rewards (reinforcers), both you and the school should quickly reinforce him for reading easy materials on topics that interest him. This is not bribery; he'll have to legitimately earn the reinforcers he gets.

Initially, it’s critical to immediately reinforce Joey after he reads what he finds doable and interesting. His effort should be reasonable and comfortable for him, not excessive or straining. Base reinforcers on effort, not skill. If he’s working with proper instructional and independent level materials, with matching tasks, a reasonable effort should produce a good result.

For homework, teachers should assign only independent-level tasks and materials. For independent work, like homework, beware of instructional level tasks and materials. Without immediate and direct teacher instruction and guided feedback, they’ll frustrate struggling readers.

Both in school and at home, use reinforcers of so much value to Joey that he’ll read to get them. Change reinforcers before they bore him, and, if possible, reinforce him at home for the reading he does in school.

As a parent, you might arrange for his teachers to send you a daily chart that tells you how much independent or instructional level materials he read in school and whether he made a reasonable effort; this will help you determine how much to reinforce him. Generally, it’s best to design the in-home program with the school and use the smallest amount of reinforcement sufficient to achieve the desired outcomes.

To sustain Joey’s motivation when systematic, artificial reinforcement ends, you and his teachers should start his motivation program by reinforcing him with frequent, age-appropriate items and activities that he values greatly, such as trading cards or 10 minutes of basketball. Then, as his performance improves, as he begins to enjoy what he’s reading and as he feels successful, gradually and inconspicuously reduce the frequency and amount of such reinforcers.

When initially reinforcing him, pair the reinforcers with positive comments that emphasize his effort: "Joey, you read silently for 15 minutes straight. You did what I asked: You stayed on task and followed the cue card’s instructions. And from our conversation, it sounds like you understood and enjoyed the story. Good job."

Continue making frequent, positive comments as you reduce and finally end the tangible and activity reinforcers. Then, gradually reduce, but don’t eliminate them. (Just about everyone needs them.)

Systematic reinforcement approaches like these usually involve applied behavior analysis (ABA). Many schools and districts have ABA consultants who can conduct functional behavioral assessments (FBA) to better target and streamline reinforcement efforts. Keep in mind that ABA programs are primarily systematic motivation programs that reinforce people to do what they’re capable of, not what’s impossible.

Question 9: For struggling readers, uncoordinated instruction creates lots of confusion. It also eliminates opportunities to practice what they need to master. So, throughout the day, how can the school coordinate all of Joey’s instruction?

Background information: Many programs for struggling readers are highly fragmented, which creates all sorts of problems, such as having all tasks and materials at the struggling readers’ proper levels for periods 1, 2 and 3, and their frustration levels for periods 4, 5, 6 and 7. These latter periods can easily crush all the benefits accrued in the earlier periods.

It’s like having two prescriptions for medications that the same person should never take. Expect awful consequences.

Conclusions

By the third and fourth grades, struggling readers' prospects for success are far dimmer than in first grade. Thus, if your kindergartner or first-grader struggles to read, it’s critical to quickly request a full set of relevant, comprehensive evaluations and frequent, valid monitoring. Along with your written request, you should submit a list of relevant questions you want answered.

Reading disabilities can erode, even destroy strong parent-child and teacher-child relationships. One way to lessen this probably is to remember that your child or student never asked to struggle with reading. It's no fun. So, listen carefully to him or her, listen to understand and plan your efforts without jeopardizing your relationship.

Sometimes it’s best to say, "Joey, put the homework away and let's play catch. It's beautiful out. I'll write a note to your teacher, telling him that the homework frustrated you, and he and I need to talk about how to make homework work for you. So, let's have some fun. Get your baseball glove."