Fourth to 12th Grade

By fourth grade, students move from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." If they are still struggling readers at this point, they will often have great difficulty with reading comprehension, simply because they are using most of their brainpower to decode words and therefore have little to nothing available for understanding what they've just read.

Older students may show these additional clues:

• Has a history of reading and spelling difficulties
• Avoids reading aloud or reading for pleasure
• Reads most materials slowly; oral reading is labored, not fluent
• Lacks a strategy to read new words
• Oral reading filled with substitutions, omissions, mispronunciations and disregard for punctuation;
• May have inadequate vocabulary
• Mispronunciation of names of people and places; tripping over parts of words
• Difficulty spelling phonetically
• Difficulty learning suffixes and prefixes, root words, and other reading strategies
• Good written expression when content is more important than spelling
• Inability to finish tests on time
• Good math skills, but difficulty with word problems
• Difficulty learning a foreign language
• Difficulty learning and reading the written portion of music