Reading Interventions and Strategies

Children experience difficulties in learning to read for a variety of reasons, including cognitive factors such as decoding (ability to pronounce written words) problems, psychological reasons such as lack of interest and motivation, and environmental differences such as inadequate facilities at home as well as in the classroom. The school psychologist must consider all these potential sources of impediment to acquiring reading skills and then develop a plan to address the cause(s). The existing policy—diagnosing poor readers who have a learning disability (LD) and poor readers who do not have a learning disability by administering an intelligence test and a reading achievement test—is not helpful in identifying the source of the reading problem, nor does it help in devising appropriate remedial procedures (Aaron, 1997). A more serious problem is that, so far, there is no convincing evidence that labeling children as LD and placing them in special education resource rooms produces any improvement in their reading achievement (Bentum & Aaron, 2003).

An uncomplicated way to understand the nature of the reading deficit is to organize the potential sources of reading difficulties into a coherent model and then [Page 433]proceed with the diagnosis by following the model. On the basis of the theories of reading and research of experts as well as our own, we (Aaron & Kotva, 1999; Joshi & Aaron, 2000) have developed a model of reading acquisition called the Component Model.