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 just to decode single 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
• Reads most materials slowly; oral reading is labored, not fluent
• Avoids reading for pleasure
• Lacks a strategy to read new words
• Oral reading filled with substitutions, omissions, mispronunciations and disregard for punctuation;
• May have inadequate vocabulary
• Uses imprecise language, such as vague references to stuff or things instead of the proper name of an object
• Not being able to find the exact word, such as confusing words that sound alike: saying tornado instead of volcano, substituting lotion for ocean, or humanity for humidity
• 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
• Poorer performance on multiple choice tests than other types of tests
• 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