The Mystery of the Struggling Reader

Chapter 1: A Case of Mistaken Identity
It was a dark and stormy research project. Kylene Beers, the president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English, was conducting an in-school study of struggling and resistant readers. And she was stumped. In front of Beers sat a seventh grader who never seemed to read, presumably because he didn’t read well and didn’t like trying. Or so Beers thought.

“Actually, I love to read,” he told her.

“You’re kidding me,” she said. “Whenever I see you in class you’re either doing your homework or 
sleeping.” A budding gymnast, the boy told Beers that practice, school, and homework left him little time for reading.

“I’m like those bulbs you plant when the weather is cool but don’t expect them to bloom until the ground temperature warms,” he said. “Those bulbs are dormant. That’s what I am. I’m a dormant reader.”

“When I asked him to explain, he said that he was just waiting for the right time, and that meant when he had some time to turn to the books he had collected and wanted to read,” she says.

For Beers it was an important 
discovery because it shed light on the time crunch many children face, and how that affects their ability to develop a habit of reading and in turn refine their reading skills. But perhaps her most important finding was this: The boy who appeared to be a struggling reader really wasn’t one at all.

For better or worse, the term 
“struggling reader” is often used to describe kids who find reading a
challenge. And the problem is serious: some studies suggest upwards of 40 percent of children don’t read as well as they should. But as Beers’ young 
subject demonstrated, “struggling reader” is a category painted with broad 
brushstrokes, so broad they cover over the individual details we need to better understand reading and readers.

The truth is, reading is a mystery to everyone. Experts continue to debate what reading is, how we learn to do it, and how it’s most effectively taught (a process they liken to teaching kids rocket science). That 80 percent of 
children will learn how to read 
regardless of how they’re taught only serves to further confuse the issue.

What is undebatable is that reading is a complex skill that almost everyone can develop and, like all other skills, one we can never really perfect. Rather than thinking in terms of good or bad, struggling or not, Beers and others suggest thinking of reading development as a lifelong, individual pursuit. “We have to stop seeing struggling readers on one side of the reading continuum,” Beers says, “and skilled readers on the other.”

Chapter 2: Examining the Evidence
So what exactly is a struggling reader? “Two decades ago it was a child reading two grades below his or her peers,” Beers says. Today it’s a child who can’t manage the demands of reading independently. “We all have difficulty with what we’re reading from time to time,” Beers says. “The difference is struggling readers don’t possess the strategies necessary to get through the text, to figure out how to get through the problem.”

Those strategies have their roots in reading’s core components (sometimes called the “Big Five”): phonemic awareness, word decoding, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the various sounds that make up words (called phonemes). Decoding is matching those sounds to letters. Vocabulary is understanding the meaning of words both orally and in print. Fluency is the ability to read and comprehend smoothly and rapidly. And comprehension means understanding what’s being read.

Maryanne Wolf, director of Tufts University’s Center for Reading and Language Research, says the goal is to get the “multiple cognitive and 
linguistic systems” that compose 
reading to work accurately, in unison, and automatically. In an academic paper, Wolf compared fluent, effective reading with the flight of a bird and quoted author William James, “So it is with children who learn to read fluently and well: They begin to take flight into whole new worlds as effortlessly as young birds take to the sky.”
But this is where the plot thickens. Nell Duke, an associate professor of teacher 
education and educational 
psychology at Michigan State University, says some children may have varying degrees of problems in all of the “Big Five.” Others have problems only in one. If may seem logical to think that 
learning one of the components will lead to learning the next, but Duke, co-director of the school’s Literacy Achievement Research Center, says that’s not necessarily so.

“The old way of thinking was that you learn things in steps, not concurrently,” Duke says. “But we’re finding that 
concurrently is the better way because comprehension helps with word 
learning and vice versa.” In other words, as kids develop skills within each of the “Big Five” they increase their capacity within each and that leads to higher levels of reading attainment.

“Outside of learning disabilities, we’re saying that the mechanics for children are the same,” Beers says. “It’s a question of developing the skill by doing it.”

Chapter 3: Telltale Signs
It’s normal for readers to struggle from time to time throughout their reading careers—just think about the difference between reading a John Grisham novel and working through a macroeconomics textbook. But there are early, identifiable stages that can put young readers at a disadvantage.

Kids who come to kindergarten and first grade with rich language experiences—language play, rhymes, and being read to from birth onward—have a deeper awareness of how 
language and reading works. Studies suggest that children without such backgrounds have an increased risk of reading difficulties.

These difficulties often become apparent within the second through fourth grades. The second-grade 
curriculum introduces students to simple chapter books with themes, characters, storylines, and a reduced reliance on using pictures for support. Some kids begin to notice that these books are too difficult for them.

Fourth grade, says Kristen McMaster, an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Minnesota, is when everything changes. “There isn’t as much emphasis on teaching kids how to read,” she says. “They need to read in order to learn other topics; they need to read a wide range of text, including math and social studies. And they have to use more critical thinking skills.”

Chapter 4: An Open and Open Case
There’s no single approach for helping struggling readers. “It’s important to understand that we’re all different,” Duke says. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution.”

As parents, you can’t control the mechanics necessary for simultaneous learning. Nor should you. “Parents don’t necessarily need to give explicit basic or advanced instruction,” McMaster says. “It’s more important that parents are exposing their kids to lots of literature and finding ways to keep them motivated.”

That means finding ways to engage infants and preschoolers in language and literature so they aren’t behind when they enter kindergarten and 
elementary school. For older children with 
reading challenges, begin by helping them 
discover what they like to read.

Most kids want to read well, and it’s a frustrating mystery to them when they can’t. So even if they’re cool to reading at first, as their skills and ability improve, their motivation and passion for reading will heat up, too. When it does, stand back. There’s a dormant reader who is about to bloom.