Teaching students with comprehension difficulties

Goals set for students with learning difficulties need to consider the foundational knowledge and skills they are missing but are required for them to be successful users of literacy. Goals might be drawn from the Victorian Curriculum F–10: English or the National Literacy Learning Progressions or include phonological and word reading goals.

Lessons may need to include activities that scaffold foundational knowledge for students or help them to recall what they already know or have learned previously about a topic.  

For example, if students are reading a text about turtles, it may be helpful to revisit previous lessons and review the content knowledge so that students can more easily make links between what they are reading and what they already know. Regular reviews of previously learnt content is a valuable way to help students embed the information in long-term memory.   

Your lessons may need to model skills or concepts using more explicit steps for students with learning difficulties. When teaching inferring skills, provide a model answer and then guide your students through the process you undertook. Use small steps to allow students to understand and practise according to your model. Giving non-example model is also a useful technique. 

The worked examples that you use when teaching students with learning difficulties should be appropriate and matched to their level of ability. This may be different from their age or year level. Focus on using straightforward examples with a clear purpose in mind. This is an excellent technique aligned with explicit instruction. It allows students to practise tasks in small steps before they must do the task more independently. Choose your worked examples to match the intentions of your lessons.

Collaborative learning needs to be considered carefully when teaching students with learning difficulties. The nature of their learning difficulty may impact on their capability to participate in group activities and tasks. However, with planning and organisation, collaborative learning can be a successful and positive experience, particularly for students with comprehension difficulties, allowing them to explore important skills and strategies as modelled by their peers.

Students with learning difficulties will benefit from being exposed to new literacy knowledge and skills more frequently and with greater intensity than their peers. Multiple exposures may involve demonstrating or modelling a new idea initially by using physical actions or a visual aid and then pairing these with language descriptions. It is important not to overwhelm students when doing this. Ensure they have a firm grasp of a piece of knowledge or skill before presenting it in a different way.

There are several ways that questioning can be used in teaching: to improve recall, to enhance a student's knowledge of a topic, to provoke higher levels of reasoning. For students with learning difficulties, however, using questioning to learn can be challenging. These students will benefit from clear scaffolding, being shown explicitly how to ask questions and to link questions with the texts they read.

To encourage as much participation as possible, differentiate the questions you ask struggling students so that they experience success. The questions you ask other students also provide opportunities for the struggling students to hear and embed the information as well.

Some students may have verbal retrieval difficulties and will benefit from being asked recognition questions prior to recall or comprehension questions.
For example, instead of asking students, 'What is the character in this text feeling?', you could first ask them, 'What are some feeling words that we know?'. Then tune students into a particular character by asking, 'What events lead up to this part of the text?'. Answering these recognition questions first will assist them in answering the subsequent comprehension question.

The feedback you provide students needs to be clear, corrective and actionable. Feedback should acknowledge what the student is currently doing well and what they need to do next. It also needs to be delivered close to the time the task was completed.

The teaching of metacognitive strategies is recommended for every aspect of literacy learning. However, students with learning difficulties commonly have challenges with using metacognitive strategies and will need additional scaffolding to do so (for example, ‘I am learning about …’ ‘I didn’t know …’ ‘I now know …’).

Differentiated teaching is essential for students with learning difficulties and should be present in each stage of a lesson. It is important to draw on the assessment data you have collected to understand where students are in their learning and what their next steps should be.

When teaching reading comprehension, it is important to draw out what a student may already know about a topic and to help stimulate this knowledge.    

For example, before reading a text about the solar system it is helpful to have students recall what they already know about solar systems. Ask them to share this knowledge with their peers or to suggest words that may be in the text. You could also ask students to predict what types of questions they might need to answer or what the text may teach them.   

If students have been taught different comprehension strategies (for example, making inferences, summarising) they might list those they could use as they read.

When introducing new content to students with learning difficulties, instruction may need to be adjusted in the following ways:

Break learning down into small steps

Avoid making big conceptual leaps or moving through new content too quickly. Break them down into smaller steps than for most of your students. Focus on teaching and then embedding the key knowledge and skills that students need to know before moving onto the next step. Ensure that your instruction is clearly sequenced, cumulative and well structured.

Make clear links between new ideas

Explain things clearly and in a way that makes the connections between existing knowledge and new knowledge explicit.

Help students focus their attention

Check-in regularly with students that have trouble focussing their attention and ignoring distractions, so that they are accountable for their progress on a task. Try asking things like, 'Show me where you will be up to when I come back in 10 minutes.'

Multimodal teaching

All students benefit from teaching being presented, and opportunities to practise, using multiple modalities (for example, auditorily and visually) instead of just being written. Teaching concepts using multiple modalities can help students to demonstrate their understanding before explaining it in sentences. It can also assist them to explain new ideas or share this knowledge or skills with others.

Ask recognition questions

Students with learning difficulties may have trouble rapidly retrieving information so that answering questions can be difficult and may even create a sense of fear for some. It is important that all students feel able to contribute to class discussions, so scaffold your questions carefully for struggling students and provide as much support as needed to facilitate a correct response.

Ask a recognition question first. For example, 'Would you call this … or …?', and then follow up with recall questions once the student's knowledge has been stimulated.

Have students explain images

When a task or text has images, you can encourage the student to describe what each image shows. They could name the items in an image or make observations about these items and the links between them.

For example, 'The bucket is next to the man.'

Help students to recognise what they have learned

The purpose of doing a task is to change what students know or can do. It is important that students understand this. After they have finished a task, teach students to ask, 'What did I learn? What do I know now that I didn't know before?'

For example, a student's reflection after reading a non-fiction book about cats might be: 'Before, I thought that all cats were pets. Now I know that there are pets and wild cats. There are also "big cats", which are wild, like tigers and lions. I didn't know that tigers and lions were also cats.'

Helping students to recognise what they have learned helps to build their confidence and self-efficacy as readers. It also shows students that they can be successful and motivates them to persevere with other activities in future.

Make sure the student can explain or show you what they know once they have finished the task, to ensure they fully understand. This type of teacher-student dialogue will help students with learning difficulties to transfer this knowledge from their short-term working memory to their long-term memory.

Create a safe space in the classroom

Many students with learning difficulties will be anxious about responding to questions and initiating tasks in their learning. This can prevent them from fully benefitting from activities and tasks designed to extend them. Calling on non-volunteers is one helpful strategy to facilitate this environment.

With scaffolding, encourage students to take risks in their literacy learning. For example, when they encounter a new word ask them, 'What do you think this could mean, based on the rest of the sentence?' Encourage them to consider links between other words they know and to think about the steps they have already taken. It is important that this is done in a positive way without consequences or value judgments (such as asking a question one-on-one instead of in front of the entire class).

Give students time to think

Providing students with enough time to process information and respond is important, particularly for students with learning difficulties. Avoid rushing students by allowing a little extra time but balance this with not letting struggling students stay for ‘too long’ when responding.

Provide regular, immediate and corrective feedback. Acknowledge what the student already knows or has done, discuss this in positive terms and then point them in the direction of what they need to know or think about next.

Teach language skills

Students with learning difficulties often have trouble thinking about texts and their meanings in different ways. This is because much of their cognitive energy is taken up with simply recognising and reading the text. This means that, compared to their peers, struggling readers may be missing out on opportunities to build their vocabulary, general knowledge and sophisticated use of language.

Gradually teach students new ways of thinking and the language for describing these actions. For example, prompting students to, 'Say it in another way' or 'Create a picture in your head'. When students learn to do this, and can use these actions when instructed, you will be more able to direct their thinking moment to moment.