Virtual Literacy Instruction for Students with Learning Disabilities
Explicit instruction in core literacy skills (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension) combined with multisensory supports, are key to helping children with language-based learning disabilities thrive in a virtual learning environment. Try these ideas and online learning tools with your students.
This resource was developed in partnership with the National Education Association.
Phonemic Awareness
Hearing and seeing the sounds in spoken language
Students with dyslexia or language-based learning differences often struggle to distinguish individual sounds in spoken language. Sounds need to be seen and heard. As your students work to understand and create these sounds, they may need to see the movements of your lips, teeth, and tongue. They also need to accurately hear the sounds being spoken.
Image: Rollins Center for Language and Literacy
Phonemic Awareness
Making word sounds visible using objects or shapes
Students with learning differences may have a difficult time with abstract tasks — those that they cannot see, touch, or experience. Hearing and playing with the sounds in spoken words is an example of an abstract task. Provide pictures to represent the words and objects or shapes to represent the sounds within those words.
Phonics and Decoding
Blending sounds into words with multisensory help
Learning to blend the sounds that letters represent can be a daunting task. Make the thinking process explicit for your kids through modeling, and add multisensory support by using moveable letters. You can also support your emerging readers through the thoughtful selection of words to be read.
Phonics and Decoding
Mapping the sounds in words to print
Students with dyslexia or other language-based learning differences, often experience challenges with phonemic awareness. Distinguishing sounds and connecting them to print is a crucial skill that strengthens decoding and sight word fluency. You can support your students with saying, moving, and mapping sounds to their spellings by using sound–spelling mapping tools.
Image: Keys to Literacy
Phonics and Decoding
Providing feedback during word chaining practice
In a word chaining exercise, the focus is on changing one sound and one grapheme (sound–spelling) at a time. Your students will need to discriminate the difference in sounds they hear, and think about how that change is represented. Provide gentle guidance and correction as needed — and be sure everyone can clearly see and hear your feedback.
Phonics and Decoding
Multisensory study of phonics patterns
To help your students quickly recognize and decode spelling patterns ("automaticity"), give them lots of opportunities to practice and apply what they have learned. For your students with learning differences, including dyslexia, memory is enhanced through multisensory experiences, so be sure to embed visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-motor options in your phonics patterns practice.
Image: University of Florida Literacy Institute
Fluency
Keeping students engaged with fluency practice
Students with learning differences need many opportunities for teacher-directed fluency practice. This can be especially challenging to do when you are not face-to-face with your students. Taking advantage of simple online tools will help children stay actively engaged in fluency practice during remote instruction.
Fluency
Making guided oral reading work in any setting
For students who are struggling, the guided oral reading strategy offers support with word, phrase, and passage level fluency. First, you model by reading the text aloud for your students, and then provide feedback and support as they read. Learn how to use this strategy effectively, in whatever setting you’re teaching in.
Vocabulary
Talking about, collecting, and using new words
Difficulties with language processing can affect a child's ability to learn and remember new vocabulary words. Here's what can help: preview and discuss key words and vocabulary, and then connect those words to your students' existing background knowledge. Use online tools to collect and display these new words in ways your students can access easily.
Image: Keys to Literacy
Vocabulary
Actively analyze the meaningful parts of words
Developing an awareness of prefixes, suffixes, and roots in words has a positive impact on students’ spelling, reading, and vocabulary development. Students who have dyslexia or another language based learning disability benefit from explicit, multisensory instruction in word analysis that includes constructing and deconstructing words.
Image: University of Florida Literacy Institute
Comprehension
Using scaffolds for asking and answering questions
Teachers spend a lot of time each day posing and soliciting questions as a way to gauge and support student comprehension. Your students with language learning differences are likely to disconnect in the midst of this, unless you model and provide guided practice with visual scaffolds and multiple response options.
Comprehension
Hooking students with visual supports
Paying attention to instruction in the classroom can be challenging for many of our students, and learning remotely creates even more of a challenge. Help your students to remember and understand the topic or text by using visuals, providing a virtual anchor chart, displaying related vocabulary, and actively involving them in completing webs or notes.
Image: Katy Independent School District (TX)
