Using a Text Restricter

For a student, reading a page of text can be a daunting task. Their anxiety may be triggered by any number of factors:

• lack of confidence in reading or comprehension ability
• difficulty with processing so much visual information at once
• awareness of the effort needed to read when decoding skills are poor

A simple support strategy can be the use of a text restricter. A text restricter reduces the amount of text that the student needs to focus on, allowing text to be broken down into manageable sections. You can make it easily by cutting out the corner section of a piece of paper. Click here to download an example of a text restricter.

Firstly, encourage the student to look at the entire page of text. Direct their attention to headings, subheadings, pictures or graphs. Ask the student to predict what they think the article/story/text will be about.

Then, overlay the text restrictor on the text and explain to the student that they will read and think about one section at a time. This allows you to help the student implement reading comprenhension strategies during the reading process (ie. clarifying unknown vocabulary or confusing sentences, summarising the information read, noting the information in a mind map, predicting what might come in the next paragraph)

Finally, remove the text restricter and encourage the student to summarise the information that they have read - this might be 3 key details/ideas that they have recalled from the text. This is when mind maps are incredibly useful for students with language and learning difficulties - use the mind map created during the reading process to provide an overall summary of the text.