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Reading Comprehension

A lot of students, even older students, struggle in reading, but few people know what to do about it.  Most of these students are not remedial, learning disabled, or even poor students; they simply have not fully developed their skills in one or more area of reading.  The longer this goes on, the more these small, underlying problems interfere with schoolwork and test scores. 

If you know that your child has not reached his or her potential in reading and would like help diagnosing where the weakness is coming from, contact us. We offer an in-person diagnostic screening to assess what reading difficulties are keeping a student feeling like a "weak reader."

Here are four of the most common reading problems we see: 

1) Disfluency (reading in a slow or choppy manner)

Why it's a Problem:  Disfluency makes it difficult to concentrate on what you're reading and makes it harder to make sense of the information. 
Solution: We use fluency training to help students increase their reading speed so that it is closer to their "thinking speed". 

2) Passage Based Reading

Why it's a Problem: Students spend their time reading text books and stories, but not passages. They don't have a method for approaching non-fiction reading passages without losing focus.
Solution: We teach strategies for active reading, identifying main ideas, annotating, and focusing during passage based reading.

3) Non-fiction Reading 

Why it's a Problem: Students are often strong in reading stories, but weak in reading information.  This is a problem because students have more "content" classes than literature classes throughout high school and college. 
Solution: We teach strategies for note-taking and processing non-fiction information.

4) Decoding Difficulties

Why it's a Problem: Many older students struggle to sound out new, long words.  This is often not noticed by teachers, but it can make the task of reading daunting.    
Solution: We teach decoding strategies that go past phonics including strategies for effectively segmenting words so they can be read easily.

Click here to learn more about our Comprehension through Composition Programs. 

Chicago: 312-260-7945                                                         Fill out our inquiry form, and we'll contact you! San Francisco: 415-963-9229