Reading difficulties are faced by most children and can occur due to several reasons.

Learning information is a sequential process involving a combination of three different

components, namely decoding, comprehension and retention. It is critical for parents
and teachers to identify the source of a childs difficulty and employ practical strategies
that can help to improve reading skills.
Given here are areas in which the child may face reading difficulties:
Decoding
Students with reading difficulties may face problems in decoding the sound of different
letters in a word. An important aspect of learning involves breaking up of the phonemes
in order to recognize a word. For instance, children with appropriate learning skills may
be able to separate the different sounds in the word bag. However, a child with reading
difficulty may find it difficult to judge the meaning between the three letters and how their
sounds can be combined to form a word.
Signs of problems in decoding:
Issues in sounding out words
Difficulty in recognizing individual words
Confusion between various letters and their sound
Lack of expression in reading
Missing punctuation marks while reading
Slow reading pace
Comprehension
Comprehending any information requires the ability to properly decode it. When children
successfully decode the sound and connection of different words, they are in a better
position to concentrate on the paragraph that they are reading. When word recognition
is not problematic, children can easily understand and remember the information.
Signs of problems in comprehension:
Confusion in the meaning of individual words and their usage in sentences
Difficulty connecting different contexts in a paragraph
Missing out or skipping significant details
Lack of concentration while reading
Inability to distinguish between important and trivial information
Retention
This requires the mastery of both decoding and comprehension skills. Proper
retention of information relies on a childs cognitive skills and the ability to organize,
summarize as well as retrieve relevant ideas. They should be able to link the present
information to something they already know. This, along with sufficient practice, will
allow the children to store any information in their long-term memory that can be
recalled whenever required.
Signs of problems in retention:
Difficulty relating what is being currently read with previous knowledge
Trouble in real-life application of information gathered
Difficulty memorizing or recapitulating the information read

Common Reading Problems

Reading Difficulties Explained By Age
It is important to understand the source of your childs reading difficulties.
Here we explain common reading problems by age group and solutions that
can help.

Elementary Age Reading Problems

Reading Problem: Does not always recognize start or end sounds

Many children know their letter sounds,

but cannot recognize these sounds when sounding out words.

Whats Going On: One of the most common causes of reading problems is a
delay in phonemic awareness, the ability to break words into individual sounds
in your head. For example, turning /cat/ not /c/ /a/ /t/. Blends such as /br/ or
/bl/ are even more challenging as are similar sounding consonants like /mu|/
and /nu/. This skill requires strong language processing.
What Gemm Can Do: Our research-based reading programs focus on
the link between language processing and reading. We speed up processing
in tiny incremental steps, effectively adding pixels to the sound clarity. This
helps the young reader identify the sounds inside words, a foundation for
decoding.
Reading Problem: Guesses, mispronounces or skips words while
reading
Many struggling readers will skip words when reading, preferring instead to
read the words they recognize first and fill in the unknown words later. Or if
they cant decode the word, they will guess.

Whats Going On: Words are skipped or guessed because they are not
recognized by a reader who is getting around a decoding problem by trying to
memorize all words. This is an inefficient strategy that runs into trouble in 3rd,
4th and 5th grade as the word list expands dramatically.
What Gemm Can Do: Your child needs to learn to read the way he/she listens,
i.e., decoding every sound or letter as it comes. This requires sound
processing skills that allow for automatic decoding at natural language speed.

Reading Problem: Forgets words even right after being helped

Many children frustrate their parents and teachers by failing to recognize the
same word on the same or next page, within a minute of two of receiving help
with the word earlier.

Whats Going On: For the struggling early reader, text can look like its written
in Russian. There are so many unrecognizable words that it is overwhelming.
Also, retention requires context. If you tell your child a word, and he hears it
the way you say he sees it written on the page, he will retain it. But more often
than not, the text and spoken word are not a match and so it is not retained.
What Gemm Can Do: By improving processing, we add pixels to the quality
of sound. This makes it possible to hear accurately and reading more and
more words. This leaves only the need to learn irregularly spelled words, a
much more manageable task.
Reading Problem: Cannot spell
No doubt, spelling rules, conventions and exceptions that take time to learn,
However, spelling in the early grades is only a concern if your child struggles
with regular, phonetic words. There is more at stake here than just spelling
accuracy. Recognition of spelling patterns is a big part of how the brain reads.
Spelling is a key decoding skill.

Whats Going On: Poor spelling is most often indicative of poor phonics
caused by weak phonological awareness. If phonetically regular words are a
problem, then your child will have a hard time learning conventions and
exceptions, since every word looks like a candidate for a rule.
What Gemm Can Do: Our program works on phonological awareness to help
make regular spelling natural, and has exercises that train rules, conventions
and exceptions.
Reading Problem: Resists reading
Many children with reading difficulties start to resist reading out loud to their
parents. Furthermore, they become easily distracted in reading times in
school.

Whats Going On: Reading out loud is humiliating for struggling readers. They
feel the pressure of parents and teachers. In addition, they see how easily
their peers read, and so they feel frustration and shame that they cannot read.
Consequently, they avoid the torture of reading wherever possible.
What Gemm Can Do: This is one of the most common reading problems. Our
primary goal is to make reading easy, more natural. If we can achieve that,
young readers will be more willing readers and put in the reading practice
required to acquire high level reading skills.
Reading Problem: Extra reading support or tutoring is not helping
Many programs, therapies and/or teachers have good reputations for helping
reading. It is also true however, that despite this added help, reading scores
in North America have remained stubbornly flat.

Whats Going On: Most training works around the underlying language
processing difficulty. Teachers and tutors create drills that work around these
underlying delays, meaning the training is long and painful.
What Gemm Can Do: Our elementary reading programs use neuroscience
principles frequency, intensity and shaping to address the underlying
impediments to reading. Being able to clearly identify syllables and blends
makes all the difference.
Reading Problem: Reading is behind compared to other subjects
For many students, reading at grade level is not a good outcome. Based on
IQ and/or performance in math and other subjects, they have the vocabulary
and understanding to be reading well above grade level. This is the definition
of a disability or glitch under performance in one or more aspects of
learning.

Whats Going On: Many bright children have a processing delay that is holding
back reading skills, impacting overall progress. This often causes frustration
and behavioral issues.
What Gemm Can Do: In most cases, improved processing can open the
floodgates. Progress to grade level and beyond tends to unfold quickly.
Natural smarts trapped in a flawed learning system is one of the best
opportunities for our reading programs to make a dramatic difference.
Middle School & Older Reading Problems

As children get older and learn how to sound out, the list of reading difficulties
changes. The reading problems for 6th graders and older are not as apparent
as not being able to sound words out. Nevertheless, they hamper academic
growth every bit as much.

Reading problems in younger children are widespread and somewhat to be

expected because reading is a challenging skill to learn. However, reading
problems in middle school or higher are more serious. They rise to the level of
at least a moderate learning disability, difficulties that need immediate
attention.

Reading Problem: Slow reader

Most students learn to decode by middle school, but they read slowly, which
impacts homework efficiency and test taking. Slow reading also erodes
interest in reading.

Whats Going On: A deliberate decoding approach that requires concentration

slows down reading speed. Similarly, an inability to comprehend and retain
text can lead to a a constant need to re-read pages, another source of slow
reading.
Reading Problem: Cannot read for long periods
Reading stamina is an important reading skill. Many children with reading
problems can only read for a few minutes at a time. This makes it difficult to
get through assigned material and the shortened periods cut down on reading
practice.

Whats Going On: A lack of reading stamina indicates reading inefficiency

and/or poor reading comprehension. Inefficient decoding that takes effort and
forces multi-tasking decoding and deriving meaning while reading is
exhausting. Flawed reading comprehension makes text uninteresting or
worse, unintelligible. Both represent the groundwork for a shorter reading
session.
What Gemm Can Do: By treating the underlying difficulty, our reading
programs help make reading efficient and, with comprehension, more
interesting and engaging.
Reading Problem: Comprehension skills not keeping up
Many reading problems only surface in middle school, when more
complicated content challenges reading skills.
Whats Going On: Reading comprehension requires automaticity in decoding,
so that the mind is completely available for comprehension. In later grades,
comprehension requires an interactive, metacognitive reading approach,
where a student is able to define main ideas and think critically about text.
These skills do not develop in students with reading problems.
What Gemm Can Do: Our early reading programs work on removing the
underlying impediments to reading, the cognitive skill gaps. Meanwhile, the
later programs use natural learning science to train and accelerate reading
comprehension with metacognition.

Reading Problem: Does not enjoy reading

Many students do not enjoy reading for any reason text books, assigned
texts, novels, newspapers, and magazines.

Whats Going On: While some students are just not interested in reading, it is
also true that it is human nature to avoid doing things you are not good at,
especially reading when extracting meaning from the text is such a chore. If
you are not a good reader, it is natural to avoid it.
What Gemm Can Do: Reading enjoyment is of course one of the holy grails of
reading programs that purport to resolve reading problems. It is a challenging
goal for high school programs as it often requires turning around an aversion
to reading that has developed over several years. Our strategy is to make
reading easier, more enjoyable. From there, it is up to the student to
recognize the improvements and run with it.