READING DIFFICULTIES: 10 tips on how to support children and young adults in Alternative Provision, Pupil Referral Units or youth justice.

Many children and young adults who are in Alternative Provision, Pupil Referral Units/Services, on the cusp of, and in, the youth justice service will experience difficulties with reading, but how can we support them? Many will have difficulties in other areas associated with learning difficulties too, such as attention and concentration, social and communication and organisation and planning (I will provide tips on these difficulties in further blogs, but as the title for this post is reading difficulties, that is what I will concentrate on!).

Children and young adults may have reading difficulties for a range of reasons. They may:

·       Have never attended school

·       Have been excluded from school

·       Have never had stable schooling e.g. moved around several schools

·       Have Dyslexia/be dyslexic (whether diagnosed or not)

·       Find it difficult to focus (may have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder traits)

·       Have a combination of the above

So… what can we do to support the child/young adult? As a practitioner, I have found 10 tips that to help children and young adults with their reading difficulties.

There are many ways to support, but here are the 10 practical tips I suggest:

1.     Any materials, documents and/or resources that needs to be read by the child/ young adult should be presented in an easy read format (see below on how to do this).

2.     Check the reading age of the materials, documents and/or resources you are giving to the child/young adult (again, see below).

3.     Where possible, use pictures as well as words to help understanding.

4.     Avoid printing on bright white paper- use buff, cream or pale blue instead to reduce the 'glare'- recycled paper works! 

5.     If giving materials, documents and/or resources to a group, ensure all copies are printed on paper as described above, not just printing one copy for the child/young adult who has difficulties. This will ensure the child/young person isn’t ‘singled out’ because of their difficulty and also it may be of benefit to others in the group that you don’t know have difficulties.

6.     Use an easy to read font such as Arial, Verdana or Comic Sans and size of 12+.

7.     Use short sentences and leave plenty of space between lines of text.

8.     Offer to read out aloud any written information.

9.     Avoid asking the child/young adult to read out aloud in a group unless this has been discussed, and agreed, beforehand.

10. Allow more time to read information. Explain the meanings of words if the child/young adult does not understand them.

I mentioned Dyslexia, what is it?

Stating all the definitions for dyslexia in this blog would take me way over my word count, but the common theme is that "dyslexia is a difficulty in the acquisition of fluent and accurate reading writing and spelling". Of course, the underlying cognitive difficulties that cause these problems also impact upon other areas, which is why checklists include items that are nothing to do with reading and writing. It is also why definitions may vary, and why support strategies include items that are outside these main areas.

One point to note is that many of the children/young adults won’t come with a diagnosis of dyslexia, but still have challenges with reading. There could be many reasons for this: their parents have reading difficulties so perceive the difficulties so perceive the difficulties as nothing unusual; their parents may not want their child to be diagnosed as they perceive there could be a stigma attached; the child/young adult could mask their difficulties by displaying ‘negative /bad’ so the focus is on their behaviour, not the cause; the child/young person could be a ‘Looked After Child’ (LAC) and been moved from foster home to foster homes and had several social workers, therefore a lack of continuity or opportunity to be assessed or they may not have had access to the professionals to be able to provide a diagnosis. 

So what we are focusing on for this blog are the practical strategies for difficulties with reading not the label, although there will be a future blog on that has an in-depth look at dyslexia, identification and support.

What is Easy Read format?

Many organisations and practitioners, especially those working with children and young adults have over the years developed ‘easy read formats’ for their materials, documents and resources. These have been shown to improve readability and comprehension. These are, in summary:

·       keeping the number of pages to 24 or less. If there are more, break the text up into more than one document.

·       using 12+ font size.

·       keeping sentences short (no more than 20 words).

·       making sentences active not passive: “The cat was chasing the mouse” (active tense) not “The mouse was being chased by the cat” (passive tense).

·       including a glossary explaining acronyms, abbreviations and jargon.

·       using pictures to support the meaning of your text.

And to check the readability?

The readability of a document is how easy or difficult the document is to read based on a number of factors such as the number of words in a sentence, the number of words that have more than three syllables and the use of active and passive sentences. There are many ways to evaluate the readability of a document, but note that many tests use the American school grades to indicate the reading level age. One way to remember this is to add one year to the American school year e.g. grade 7 is Year 8, or use this chart:

Flesch Reading Ease test

This test rates text on a 100-point scale. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. For most standard files, you want the score to be between 60 and 70.

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test

This test rates text on a U.S. school grade level. For example, a score of 8.0 means that an eighth grader can understand the document. For most documents, aim for a score of approximately 7.0 to 8.0.

Fog Index- Gunning Fog Score

This test uses a formula to identify the readability of a document:

Reading Level (Grade)=(Average number of words in a sentence + percentage of words with 3 or more syllables) x 0.4 The number is the Gunning Fog Index. This shows, hypothetically the number of years in education (U.S Grade) the reader would need to read and understand the document.

SMOG Index

‘Simple Measure of Gobbledygook’ or SMOG index is very similar to the Fog Index in that it uses a formula, the number of syllables (polysyllables) and words in a sentence. This test shows, again hypothetically, the number of years in education the reader would need to read and understand the document.

Coleman- Liau Index

This test, again rates text on a U.S. school grade level, but this test uses the characters not the syllables of a word in its formula.

So why have I identified these tests? Because they all show the readability of a document. They are also the tests applied to text if you use free readability websites e.g. https://www.readabilityformulas.com/free-readability-formula-tests.php or https://www.webfx.com/tools/read-able/

If you are unable to access the internet, it is possible to check the readability score of your document in Word. The steps below will depend on what version of Microsoft Word you have, but as an example in Microsoft Word 365, you can:

1.     Select ‘Review’

2.     Select ‘Spelling and Grammar’. 

3.     The spelling and grammar of the document will be checked and a dialogue box will open.

The dialogue box will show the readability scores against the Flesch Reading Ease test and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level test.

You may need to turn this functionality on. (You can usually find this through File/Options/Proofing /When correcting spelling and grammar in Word/Show readability statistics or similar)

And in case you were wondering, I do practise what I preach. Here are the stats for this blog post:

I hope you found this blog useful, but if you would like any further information, go to https://www.doitprofiler.com/sectors/justice-2/youth/