Talking Is Teaching: Reading Comprehension Strategies for ADHD and Dyslexia Families
- Kelly Sutherland
- 11 hours ago
- 8 min read
Your child can read the words on the page. You've watched them do it. But when you ask what it meant — blank. Or a half-answer that makes you wonder if they were really in there at all.
If this is your daily reality, you're not dealing with a decoding problem. You might be dealing with an oral language gap. And one of the most effective reading comprehension strategies for ADHD and dyslexia families costs nothing and doesn't require a single worksheet.
It requires five turns of conversation.
The Short Answer
The most effective reading comprehension strategy for ADHD families that most parents overlook is extended conversation. Research by Dr. Tricia Zucker and Dr. Sonia Cabell shows that five back-and-forth conversation turns — on any topic — build the oral language foundation reading comprehension depends on. For ADHD families, the key adaptation is following the child's topic, not redirecting to an "educational" one, and aiming for five connected turns rather than one long discussion.
What Strive for Five Actually Is (And Why It Matters for Reading)
Strive-for-Five Conversations was written by Dr. Tricia A. Zucker, Professor of Pediatrics and Co-Director of the Children's Learning Institute at the University of Texas Health Science Center, and Dr. Sonia Q. Cabell, Associate Professor of Reading Education at Florida State University's Center for Reading Research. Both are former classroom teachers. Dr. Zucker's research focuses specifically on children experiencing learning difficulties and early reading disabilities.
Their finding is disarmingly simple: most conversations between adults and children end too quickly. A child says something. An adult responds. The conversation closes. And the language-building opportunity that was just beginning never develops.
Their framework says: go five turns. Start with what the child says. Follow their lead. Ask a follow-up question. Then do it four more times.
Not five minutes. Five turns.
"Kudos to Drs. Zucker and Cabell for creating such a highly useful manual for parents, caregivers, and teachers to strategically support children's language development, which is key to helping all students become skillful readers and writers." — Jan Hasbrouck, Ph.D., researcher and author of Conquering Dyslexia
📚 Find the book: [Strive-for-Five Conversations on Amazon] | [The Reading League] | [Barnes & Noble]
What Five Conversation Turns Actually Build
Zucker and Cabell identify five things that grow through extended conversation — and if you look at this list, you'll recognize it as the exact list of things that break down when reading comprehension fails.
Talking and thinking. Extended conversation requires children to organize and express ideas. That's active cognitive work, happening every time you go five turns deep.
Knowledge. Every conversation on a topic deposits more background knowledge into long-term memory. A child who has had ten conversations about volcanoes is more prepared to comprehend any text mentioning geology, natural disasters, or earth science — even if their decoding skills are behind.
Vocabulary. The words adults use naturally in conversation expose children to language that doesn't appear in everyday speech. Books and extended conversations are the primary vehicles for this kind of vocabulary growth.
Verbal reasoning. When a conversation asks a child to explain why something happened, predict what might happen next, or defend a position, they're practicing the same inferential thinking that reading comprehension depends on.
Language structures. The way ideas connect in academic text mirrors the way ideas connect in rich conversation. Children who have had more extended conversations arrive at written text with a more developed structural map already in place.
[EMBED VIDEO HERE: Why Your Child Struggles to Read on a Screen — Why Series Video 1]
Reading Comprehension Strategies for ADHD and Dyslexia: The Honest Piece
Here's what the classroom framework doesn't fully address — because it was written for teachers, not for families navigating ADHD.
In a classroom, the teacher controls the environment. They initiate the conversation, redirect gently, and maintain the thread through a derail. In a family with ADHD — in the parent, the child, or both — the conditions for extended conversation are genuinely different.
What I've observed across 25 years of classroom work, and what I hear consistently from families: a conversation starts well, then somewhere around turn two or three, something interrupts the thread. An impulsive topic jump. An executive function spike. A child who gets overstimulated by their own excitement and starts talking faster than their thoughts can organize. A parent who is running on empty at 7pm and can't hold the conversational thread long enough to respond thoughtfully to turn four.
The conversation ends — not because anyone wanted it to. Because ADHD made the sustained attention required for five turns genuinely difficult.
I call this the ADHD tax on oral language development. And I want to be clear: it is not a failure of parenting or effort. It is a neurological reality that requires specific adaptations to work around.
Four Adaptations That Make Strive for Five Work at Home
1. Follow the child's topic, even when it isn't "educational"
ADHD kids are most likely to sustain a conversation when they chose the topic. A child who launches into a monologue about Minecraft is demonstrating exactly the oral language extended conversation builds — you just need to ask a follow-up question that goes five turns deep on Minecraft. "What's the hardest thing you've tried to build?" is a comprehension question. Your child just doesn't know that yet.
2. Aim for five turns on one idea, not one long conversation
Five turns can happen in the car, at the dinner table before the conversation naturally shifts, or during the walk to the bus stop. The five turns don't need to be profound. They need to be connected — each response building slightly on what came before, rather than bouncing to a new topic after every exchange. Start with three turns and celebrate that. Work toward five. The goal is a habit, not a performance.
3. Use concrete follow-up questions before abstract ones
"What happened first?" is easier than "Why do you think that happened?" — but both build comprehension. Sequence first. Cause and effect later. This mirrors good reading comprehension instruction and keeps the conversation alive when abstract reasoning feels like too much pressure.
4. Normalize the imperfect exchange
Not every five-turn conversation will feel like a meaningful literacy moment. Some will be loud, tangential, and only barely on topic. That's fine. Zucker and Cabell write that Strive for Five conversations build trust as much as vocabulary — because they communicate: your ideas are worth five rounds of my attention. For ADHD kids who often feel like they're too much, too loud, or too scattered, that message is its own form of comprehension scaffolding.
Why This Is One of the Best Reading Comprehension Strategies for Dyslexia Families
If your child has dyslexia, conversation might be the single most powerful reading support tool available to you — because it bypasses the place where dyslexia creates the most friction.
Decoding is hard. But comprehension is not a decoding skill. It's a language skill. And language doesn't require a child to read a single word.
A child with dyslexia who has rich, extended conversations about history, science, sports, or anything they're curious about is building the exact same background knowledge and oral language structures as any other child — without the decoding barrier getting in the way. When they eventually encounter that content in print, the comprehension work is already done. The words have somewhere to land because the conversations already built the landing pad.
This is also why read-alouds are so powerful for dyslexia families — something we'll cover in detail in the next post in this series.
A Simple Weekly Practice to Start
You don't need to overhaul how your family communicates. You need one moment a day where you stay five turns deep.
In the car: Your child mentions something. Don't let it drop after one exchange. Ask a follow-up question. Wait. Respond. Ask one more. Go five rounds.
At dinner: Pick one topic and stay on it for five turns before the conversation shifts. It doesn't matter what the topic is.
At bedtime: Ask one specific question. Not "how was school?" — that one closes in one turn. "What's something you noticed today that seemed weird or interesting?" — that one can go five.
None of these require a book. None require educational content. They require presence and follow-through for five turns. That's the curriculum.
Where This Series Is Going
This is Post 4 in the Building Readers at Home series, connected to the YouTube video Why Your Child Struggles to Read on a Screen.
Post 1: Why Background Knowledge Matters More Than Reading Skill → https://www.learninginadistractedworld.com/post/background-knowledge-reading-comprehension-adhd-dyslexia
Post 2: How to Help Your Child Remember What They Read →https://www.learninginadistractedworld.com/post/visual-reading-strategies-adhd-dyslexia-annotation
Post 3: The Secret Pattern Hidden in Every Reading Passage → https://www.learninginadistractedworld.com/post/the-secret-pattern-hidden-in-every-reading-passage-and-how-to-help-your-child-find-it
Post 4: Conversation as the Foundation (this post) →
Post 5 (coming soon): Read Aloud as a Comprehension Strategy — what it is, why it works, and the specific benefits for ADHD and dyslexia families
Read the Original Research
The Strive for Five framework belongs to Dr. Tricia A. Zucker and Dr. Sonia Q. Cabell. If you want to go deeper:
📚 Strive-for-Five Conversations — Zucker & Cabell | Scholastic / The Science of Reading in Practice
📖 Cabell & Zucker (2023): "Using Strive-for-Five Conversations to Strengthen Language Comprehension" — The Reading Teacher, December 2023
🎓 Free edWebinar with the authors: Accelerate Language Comprehension with the Strive-for-Five Framework
🏛️ Family-friendly summary: Conversations with Kids — Strive for Five (Ohio Family Engagement Center)
Ready to Go Deeper?
The conversation practices in this post are expanded inside Family Learning Adventures, including conversation starter cards built for ADHD brains and NotebookLM activities that extend the practice.
👉 All free resources in one place: [Smart Link]
📺 Watch the video that anchors this series: Why Your Child Struggles to Read on a Screen
Read Next: →
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is Strive for Five and how does it build reading comprehension?
Strive for Five, developed by researchers Dr. Tricia Zucker and Dr. Sonia Cabell, is the practice of extending conversations with children to at least five back-and-forth turns. Research shows this builds the oral language foundation — vocabulary, reasoning, background knowledge, and language structures — that reading comprehension depends on. It's one of the most effective reading comprehension strategies available to families because it requires no materials, no curriculum, and no scheduled lesson time.
Q: Can Strive for Five work with older children, not just kindergarteners?
Yes. While the book was written with early childhood in mind, the principle that extended conversation builds oral language and comprehension applies across ages. For upper elementary students, the conversations become more sophisticated — requiring more abstract reasoning and inference — but the five-turn goal remains a useful anchor for keeping exchanges substantive.
Q: My child with ADHD can't stay on one topic for five turns. What do I do?
Start with three turns and celebrate that. Following your child's chosen topic — rather than redirecting to an "educational" one — dramatically improves how many turns ADHD kids will sustain. Minecraft, their favorite show, something they saw on the way to school — all valid. The research tracks exchanges, not topic quality.
Q: Is Strive for Five the same as Dialogic Reading?
Related but distinct. Dialogic reading is a specific read-aloud technique that prompts conversation during shared book reading. Strive for Five is a broader conversational framework that can happen during any interaction — including read-alouds, but also at mealtimes or in the car. Both are grounded in the same oral language research.
Q: How does this connect to the baseball study from Post 1?
They're deeply connected. The baseball study showed background knowledge overrides reading skill in comprehension — and Strive for Five is one of the primary ways background knowledge gets built. Every extended conversation on a topic deposits more knowledge into long-term memory, so children arrive at academic texts with more built-in comprehension scaffolding.
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