The purpose of AT is to assist students with their receptive and expressive language. Students with AT require support with decoding (reading) information or encoding (writing) information.

Assistive Technology reading tools essentially allow students to leverage a relative strength of listening comprehension to support challenges with decoding (recognizing) words.

Assistive Technology writing tools essentially allow students to leverage an area of strength such as phonemic awareness (the ability to hear the sounds in words) or their oral language to support challenges with encoding (spelling) words.

1. Providing accessible texts to students with decoding and/or reading comprehension difficulties.

2. Awareness that understanding can be shown using a variety of tools such as typing, word prediction, talk to text, audio or video recording, and scaffolded writing programs (Clicker Suite).

Teachers of students with AT balance the use of AT, to allow the student to access the curriculum and participate in learning activities, with purposeful and targeted foundational language instruction.

AT reading supports allow students to access texts and other curricular materials. For example, a student may be able to participate fully in a Science lesson if they can listen to the article rather than reading or decoding it themselves. However, other parts of the day, week, or learning cycle should be dedicated to developing decoding sub-skills to help this student close this learning gap.

When deciding if AT should be used for a particular reading activity, a teacher can ask themselves: What is the purpose of the reading in this activity? Is the student reading to learn or is the student learning to read?

AT is intended to support situations in which a student is reading to learn. When reading instructions, assessment questions, math word problems, a science article, etc., the purpose of the reading is to receive the information. In this situation, the accurate and clear receiving of the information is more important than practicing the skill of decoding.

A student should engage with a text, without AT supports, when the primary focus of the task is learning to read. If reading-to-self, the leveled text should be at a student's independent reading level. Growth with decoding skills is most likely to occur with a guided reading approach, using a text at a student's instructional reading level, and in a small group with the teacher. This is especially important in situations of remediation or gap closing. Explicit focus on decoding sub-skills such as phonological awareness (rhyming, segmentation, phonemic awareness), high-frequency word recognition, syllabication, spelling patterns, and sounds, etc can help build this foundation.

When learning to read, developing reading comprehension skills using an independent or instructional reading level text is also very important. However, it is also critical to note that many students with AT, experience challenges with decoding, yet have average or above-average intelligence. Interacting with texts at their independent or instructional reading level may be very intellectually unengaging. However, these students will likely not be able to effectively decode most text-based class learning materials, which can also be very disengaging. These students may have listening comprehension abilities at or approaching grade level and can thrive with their learning engagement when regularly provided accessible texts (texts that they can listen to using their AT).