Been on a mission for years to get my dyslexic children to read on their own. It is a major feat. Experts, tutors, and teachers always are advising parents to have their children spend time reading. For my family, it’s been a difficult and painstaking task.
Children with LD typically get fatigued with reading. It’s like being forced to do something you hate, like chores — I find it easier to do chores than to sit and read a book. Two of my children are the same. Reading is like torture to us.
I tried everything to get them to read. Rewards charts, sticker charts, screen time exchanges, threats, used carrots and (verbal) sticks, withheld playtime and access to electronics and their favorite playthings and bought jars upon jars of reward toys.
Why is it so important that your child spend time reading? Dyslexic learners need more exposure of words to recall them to automaticity. That means, they no longer have to decode the word, rather reading the word is automatic. A typical learner may need just a few times to learn a new word, while a dyslexic learner needs many more exposures (in extreme cases, hundreds of times) to learn new words. Automaticity is important because once reading is fluent and automatic, the child no longer has to spend energy decoding and reading, instead, she may learn and comprehend the text – the ultimate goal. Plus, reading builds vocabulary.
Ear reading is helpful too. My youngest listens to a lot of audiobooks. Although it doesn’t help with automaticity, she gains vocabulary and can access text that would be too frustrating to read. If it wasn’t for audiobooks, she would have missed a passion for all things Harry Potter.
Recently I discovered TV reading. I just couldn’t get her to read without a fight and thought, well subtitles and captions are reading so we found foreign shows and Korean dramas that were highly addictive and forced you to read. Plus the text is fast, so she increases her fluency. We watch together and talk about challenging words, which builds vocabulary (and closeness). I wish someone would have told me about this before. It would have saved me tons of arguments and frustration. That’s why I’m sharing this with you!
If your child doesn’t like foreign shows, that’s ok. We turn on the subtitles and lower the volume on English language shows. In fact, she loves Disney channel. The remote is nowhere to be seen (oops!) and the TV volume button stopped working. Oh well, now she’s reading for hours, we’re no longer fighting about reading or watching too much TV, I’m spending time off the TV and having a very productive day!
Plus there’s research to back it…
Reading Rockets a fantastic resource for teaching struggling readers, indicates that captioning and subtitles can help strengthen the following reading skills of students with learning disabilities, ELLs, and struggling or beginning readers:
- Reading speed and fluency
- Word knowledge
- Decoding
- Vocabulary acquisition
- Word recognition
- Reading comprehension
- Oral reading rates
TV reading, an incredible solution for getting your dyslexic child who hates reading, reading!