Supporting Reading Comprehension for Students with Inattention

 By Nate Feldman

*Some suggestions include: Explicit vocabulary instruction with the use of graphic organizers, support the generation of main idea statements, and summaries, and giving students the opportunity work in pairs. 

*Build vocabulary before reading a text. Background knowledge of words is important in understanding a reading text.   Create a semantic map.  This often includes a student-friendly definition of the word, an illustration, synonyms, and example sentences which students can write. 

*Make sure you pause while reading a text to make sure students are getting the gist of the passage. Getting the gist is understanding who or what a passage is about and what is important about who or what.  

*Create vocabulary maps that focus on the word, definition, illustration, and context.  

*The teachers can create cue cards for the students to use while doing a reading passage to talk about who or what is important in different parts of the reading passage and why they are important.  In other words, they can write the gist for different sections of the reading passage.  At first, the teacher provides scaffolding, which means they help give the students clues for finding the information.  Gradually, they remove the scaffolding so that students can find main ideas without being told where to look for them.

Cue card with scaffolding

*Have the students write a summary to show they understand the main idea of parts of a reading passage.  The ability to summarize what one has read shows how much they grasped the main ideas of the reading passage.