Best Special Education Reading Strategies

In the 2022–2023 school year, 15% of public school students were reported to be receiving special education services. Within that percentage, 32% of those students had a specific learning disability like dyslexia. It is imperative that these students get the support they need during their literacy acquisition journey. 

Accelerated learning is being prioritized now more than ever. This can be particularly hard on teachers, especially when there is a national shortage of teachers and content-area specialists. So, how can educators go about supporting special education students without stretching themselves too thin? It all comes down to implementing evidence-backed reading strategies supported by the science of reading.

What Is a Learning Disability?

Learning disabilities are defined as “a group of brain disorders that affect a broad range of academic and functional skills, including the ability to read, write, listen, speak, reason, or complete mathematical tasks.” While there are certain parameters for different learning disabilities, one student’s experience is going to look completely different from the next.

In this blog, we’ll be covering some of the best evidence-based strategies to help students with disabilities strengthen their reading comprehension skills.

Essential Reading Strategies for Students With Learning Disabilities

So, what exactly is reading comprehension? Gough and Tunmer (1986) described reading comprehension as the product of decoding and language comprehension. This was known as the Simple View of Reading. For students with learning disabilities, comprehension can be particularly difficult. One reason for this is the difference between automatic thinking and cognitive thinking.

For example, let's say you ask two students to spell the word “car.” Student A writes down the word in two seconds and is ready to move on immediately. This is automatic thinking. Student B’s thought process might include questions like, “Does car start with a c or a k? Is the second letter an a? The last letter is an r. How do I write an r?” This is cognitive thinking, which involves actively thinking about every step in the process before acting.

According to this article in the Michigan Reading Journal, students with learning disabilities typically have to put in a tremendous amount of effort to actively think about learning. They also tend to need more modeling and practice than other students. Because these students might lack the cognitive processing skills needed to read and write, they tend to avoid those activities, which puts them even further behind their peers.

Provide Explicit Instruction

Explicit instruction is a key component of an approach to reading called Structured Literacy, which is a term coined by the International Dyslexia Association. Students with learning disabilities greatly benefit from explicit, step-by-step instructions for every part of the literacy acquisition process—especially reading comprehension. “Explicit instruction” just means that teachers are stating exactly what is expected, defining terms, modeling, giving examples, and including step-by-step directions on the board for students to follow.

Build on Students’ Prior Knowledge

Good readers create meaning from texts by connecting new information with topics and concepts they already understand. Developing prior knowledge should occur in all stages of reading—not just comprehension—and it can be especially helpful for students with learning disabilities. Having students connect texts to their real-life experiences before, during, and after reading will help strengthen their comprehension abilities.

Have Students Identify Themes

Theme identification is a key component of early reading comprehension. For younger students, this means asking them to determine the lesson or moral of the story they just read. As students become stronger in their reading comprehension abilities, theme identification can branch out into more complex topics. In many cases, theme identification for elementary-age students helps build their background knowledge, which can then be applied to other texts in the future.

Use Graphic Organizers

Graphic organizers serve as visual representations that assist students with identifying, organizing, and remembering important concepts from what they read. When used effectively, they can be great tools for reading strategies for special education students and students with learning disabilities by highlighting the most important parts of a text while filtering out the extra details that can cause cognitive overload.

Graphic organizers work best when they're matched to the strategy being taught. Here are a few examples tied directly to the reading comprehension strategies outlined above:

• Story maps help students identify key narrative elements (characters, setting, problem, and solution), making theme identification more structured and accessible.

• KWL charts (Know, Want to Know, Learned) support the activation of prior knowledge before reading and help students consolidate new information after.

• Venn diagrams allow students to compare and contrast ideas, characters, or texts, which is particularly useful during literature circles when students are connecting multiple perspectives.

• Sequence/flow charts break down events or steps in order, which supports students who benefit from seeing explicit, step-by-step progressions—especially during summarization practice.

• Main idea and detail webs reinforce the summarization skill of identifying a topic sentence and supporting details, which helps students visually distinguish essential information from redundant or trivial content.

These tools are a natural complement to explicit instruction: Teachers can model how to complete each organizer, provide guided practice, and gradually release responsibility to students as their confidence grows.

Incorporate Literature Circles

Literature circles and other forms of peer-to-peer reading activities are great ways to get students involved and excited about reading. Within these groups, students are supporting each other’s learning with teacher guidance, and each student gets assigned a role: discussion leader, vocabulary enricher, illustrator, and connector. Each group should have around four to six students, which allows those who tend to stay on the sidelines of classroom discussions to get directly involved with what they’re learning.

Mastering Special Education Reading Comprehension Through Summarization

The Council for Learning Disabilities outlines what educators should do before, during, and after introducing a new text to students with learning disabilities.

Before reading, one of the best things to do is to activate students’ background knowledge. As mentioned before, students better understand and retain information when they’re familiar with it. The CLD's tips include:

1. Use specific strategies to activate prior knowledge, such as previewing headings or key concepts and making a prediction and confirmation chart.

2. Prepare and guide previewing activities to support and focus the connections students make.

3. Use graphic organizers to introduce important information, solicit prior knowledge from students, and make predictions.

4. Avoid soliciting guesses from students without guidance or feedback.

5. Keep it short; previewing should not take longer than five minutes, especially if a teacher has limited time with students.

6. Revisit after reading to assist in reviewing, confirming, or refuting predictions, summarizing, and making connections.

Along with activating prior knowledge, explicitly teach specialized vocabulary terms for the text and ask students to predict what will happen next to get them thinking.

During reading, make sure to teach students what types of questions they should be asking, as well as how to ask them. These include questions that have answers directly in the text, as well as questions whose answers must be inferred. It is also important to show students how to evaluate questions posed by the teacher to determine if the answer can be found in the text or if it is something they have to infer.

Along with asking questions, bringing in graphic organizers to visually show what is happening in the text is extremely helpful for students—especially those with learning disabilities.

After reading, show students how to summarize the text they just read. This should be taught in an explicit and systematic way, as teachers shouldn’t assume that students will understand how to summarize texts automatically. The CLD outlines how to do this:

1. Provide explicit and systematic instruction through modeling, feedback, and practice of summarization rules, such as:

   • Selecting a topic sentence or inventing a topic sentence if one is not explicitly stated

   • Using one word to replace a list of related items

   • Deleting trivial and redundant information

   • Rereading to make sure your summary makes sense

2. Teach students how to use mnemonic strategies and graphic organizers to write summaries.

3. Use guided reading practice to provide examples and non-examples of effective summaries.

Making Reading Possible for Everyone

The vast majority (95%) of students have the ability to learn how to read, even those who have learning disabilities. The best way to ensure success is to lead with a Structured Literacy framework and evidence-based strategies. This means making sure instruction is based on the science of reading.

Dyslexia often requires multisensory learning techniques to bridge the gap between sounds and letters. Potentially 1 in every 5 students in a given classroom has dyslexia, which is why it’s so important to know what to look out for and how to best support these students. This Lexia® white paper explains how to identify signs of dyslexia and implement phonological awareness training early, as well as how to provide effective interventions that allow for student success.

Frequently Asked Questions About Special Education Reading

How do you support a student who can decode fluently but has poor comprehension?

• Strong decoding without strong comprehension usually signals a gap in language comprehension—not word recognition. Based on the Simple View of Reading, instruction should shift toward building background knowledge, expanding vocabulary, and teaching students to understand complex sentence structures. Explicitly modeling strategies like questioning, inferencing, and summarization is also key.

Can these reading strategies be used in a general education inclusive classroom?

• Yes. The strategies in this post align with the Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which recognizes that what's necessary for students with learning disabilities is often beneficial for all learners. English Language Learners, struggling readers, and general education students all benefit from explicit instruction, graphic organizers, and structured comprehension practice. Embedding these approaches into everyday instruction creates more equitable outcomes across the board.