Common Types of Reading Problems and How to Help Children Who Have Them

Patterns of reading difficulty provide an educationally useful way to think about different kinds of reading problems, whether those problems are mainly experiential in nature (e.g., those common among English learners) or associated with disabilities (e.g., those typical of children with dyslexia). This article reviews research on three common patterns of poor reading: specific word‐reading difficulties, specific reading‐comprehension difficulties, and mixed reading difficulties. The purpose of the article is to explain how teachers can use assessments to identify individual struggling readers’ patterns of reading difficulties, and how this information is valuable in differentiating classroom instruction and planning interventions.