Disability411 - Show20 - LD and Reading -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 5/9/2007
Last Visited: 6/15/2009
Today we interview Ellen Engstrom from Landmark College.
Ellen is an expert on teaching English to students with learning disabilities.
In today's interview, Ellen talks about the difficulties students with learning disabilities face when it comes to reading and some of the techniques and tools available to help students overcome this barrier to information.
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As promised, we are back to our interview format and today we are talking to Ellen Engstrom, from Landmark College.
She's a specialist in learning disabilities and working with teaching reading to students with learning disabilities.
She's going to talk to us today about some of the barriers that students with learning disabilities face when it comes to reading and some of the techniques and tools that can be used to help them compensate for those difficulties.
So, let's get to our interview.
[Music]
Beth Case: Today we have with us Ellen Engstrom, from Landmark College.
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Ellen, thanks for joining us today.
Ellen Engstrom: Thank you, thank you for having me.
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Ellen Engstrom: All right.
I work at Landmark College, in Putney, Vermont.
Landmark College, for those you who don't know, is a college that is specifically for students that have learning disabilities and/or attention deficits.
All of our students come to Landmark College with some kind of a diagnosis.
The college grants an Associates Degree and we also have a very robust developmental skills program for students who have the potential to go college, but need to develop the skills or the strategies to be able to be successful in college.
Ellen Engstrom: What I do here at Landmark is a couple of things, I'm an associate professor here and I've been here for a little more than seven years.
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Beth Case: Ellen is here with us today specifically to talk about students who have learning disabilities and some of barriers they face with reading and some the techniques and tools that they can use to help compensate and overcome some those barriers.
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So Ellen, I'll just turn it over to you.
Ellen Engstrom: Thank you, Beth.
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Ellen Engstrom: Fluent reading is essential for good comprehension.
Fluent readers are so automatic that they don't have to think about, let alone concentrate on decoding words or breaking that code.
They can completely focus their attention on what the meaning of the text is.
They can make connections between the concepts in the text and what they know about a subject and so they are able to build upon their background knowledge, add to their vocabulary and things of this nature.
Ellen Engstrom: Poor readers have to focus their attention on decoding words, so they don't have any attention left for the comprehension part.
Basically, when you have somebody who is not a fluent reader, for a variety of reasons, they don't had access to text in the same way.
It takes them a very long time to read, they often don't get all of the meaning out of the text and reading becomes an arduous and really frustrating process.
Ellen Engstrom: What technology has done for readers is to provide them with a wonderful way of actually reading the text so that people can hear it, follow it and read it on the screen.
What a text reader will do is, at its very most basic, will read electronic text to the user, who then can follow along with it on the screen and receive the auditory meaning of what he or she is reading.
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Ellen Engstrom: Exactly.
That's exactly the point.
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Ellen Engstrom: Absolutely.
I don't endorse products either.
It looks like I do sometimes because I discuss what I typically use, but in fact, that's really not the case.
Ellen Engstrom: It's all well and good to have a text reader that will read text, but when you are doing academic reading, textbook reading, lots of content reading and things like that for secondary and post secondary education, you also need some other strategies to be able to understand and break down the text so that it is meaningful to you.
What I like to do in the way that I teach this to students, is to combine an active reading strategy with the use of the text reader, so that students are using the text reader, but are also being active with it.
For example, what I mean, a good reading strategies start with pre-reading, which involves just simply familiarizing yourself with the text; looking at the pictures, looking at the title, looking at any headings there might be or questions, things like that in order to get your attention and focus set on the topic.
Sometimes, it activates background knowledge or other things that you know about the topic.
Everybody knows, but research also shows that comprehension is greatly enriched if you can connect what you're reading about to something that is familiar, so consequently that is an important step.
Ellen Engstrom: What's great about a program like Kurzweil 3000, is that you can program it so it will just read headings.
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Ellen Engstrom: The other thing that I think is great is, we always want to encourage students and really, any good learning strategy just follows the memory process, and so it it is with active reading.
You want to be able to paraphrase or retell what the meaning of the text is and with Kurzweil, you can make margin notes, electronic margin notes in the margins of your text, write them in and then the screen reader can go back and read them back to you.
You can also dictate notes or even use another level of technology, which is voice recognition, such as Dragon Naturally Speaking.
You can dictate the notes into the computer and it will write the words out, which of course, is like magic, it's really wonderful.
Ellen Engstrom: What's great about doing that is that you've got paraphrased notes and if you have to write a summary, and summary writing is a constant in academic settings, you can then extract your paraphrased notes, which can then help you fashion a summary.
It's really a very complete program.
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Ellen Engstrom: I agree with you.
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Ellen Engstrom: No. Of course, I beat my students over the head about how important it is to have some kind of a text marking system because you read so much stuff in college or graduate school and if you don't have some way to notate or mark somewhere in the text where important stuff is, then you really have to go back and reread it and that is horribly inefficient.
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Ellen Engstrom: Yes, exactly.
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Ellen Engstrom: Yes, version nine has great voices.
It's funny because I started teaching with this program back in 1999 and that first voice that Kurzwell had, I think his name was Keith, they all had names, Keith sounded a lot like the computer, HAL, in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It was just dreadful and students complained and complained.
Then they came out with some better voices, but they were still pretty robotic.
More and more students found it useful, but still there were complaints.
Now that we have version nine, I'm not really hearing that from my students, who are great critics of anything they can be critics about, so I think that is a testimony to the quality of the voices that have come along.
Ellen Engstrom: The other thing about using a program like Kurzwell or using a screen reader, is that you can use it to read the web, which means that some on my students that have difficulty with seeing or reading can use it to read their email and can use it to do website research.
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Ellen Engstrom: That's a big area.
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Ellen Engstrom: Absolutely, that's a topic all of it's own, that's safe to say.
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Ellen Engstrom: Yes, thank you for reminding me about that.
One of the great features is that there is reference features in Kurzwell.
There is a built-in dictionary and thesaurus within the program, so that if you simply put your cursor in front of a word that you want to know the meaning for, you can either click on the dictionary icon in the toolbar, at which point a dictionary definition will come up and you can have Kurzwell read it to you were you can go on what is my favorite tool, which is the thesaurus, which gives you synonyms, or words that mean the same thing as the word you are wanting to know, which is very helpful for paraphrasing too.
That's great.
Ellen Engstrom: Kurzwell actually has a whole writing tool thing, we are not talking specifically about writing, but suffice it to say that when you are writing these margin notes, you have access to things like word prediction as well as spell check.
You can also have the program speak the words after you write them, so you can be sure that which you wrote is what you meant to, which is a nice feature, very useful.
Ellen Engstrom: Another thing that is great about it is many students with learning disabilities need to have their tests read to them, test taking becomes a really difficult procedure.
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Ellen Engstrom: Absolutely.
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Ellen Engstrom: Absolutely.
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Ellen Engstrom: Absolutely.
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Ellen Engstrom: Exactly.
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Please email me if you have any questions, I can pass them on to Ellen.
We are actually going to have her back in a few weeks, she will be talking about learning disabilities and difficulties stude
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