Using AI to Help Struggling Readers

TL;DR

(Instructional Guidance, Transcript, and Prompts below)

This video demonstrates practical ways that teachers can use artificial intelligence (AI) to help students—especially those who struggle with reading—fully engage with classroom texts. The focus is on using AI tools like ChatGPT to modify or supplement instructional materials so that every student can access the same learning opportunities.

Understanding the Challenge

In any classroom, some students will find the assigned reading too difficult. Simply expecting them to “do their best” or excluding them from the activity sets them up for failure. Instead, teachers can use AI to adapt resources so that all learners can participate and comprehend effectively.

Strategy 1: Prepare a Text Synopsis

Teachers can ask AI to create a short synopsis of the reading selection, giving students a preview of what they will study. This builds background knowledge and context before diving into the full text.

Strategy 2: Create a “Cliff’s Notes” Version

AI can generate a structured summary including key events, characters, themes, quotes, and study questions. These help students organize information into mental “buckets,” improving comprehension during reading.

Strategy 3: Revise the Reading Level

When the original text is too challenging, teachers can use AI to rewrite it at a more accessible grade or Lexile level. This maintains all essential ideas while matching students’ current reading abilities, ensuring they can still participate in lessons and discussions.

Strategy 4: Build Vocabulary Support

AI can identify challenging words, generate kid-friendly definitions, and place each word in its original sentence and a simplified version. Reviewing vocabulary before reading improves both word knowledge and comprehension.

Strategy 5: Provide Section Summaries

By condensing a text into short sections with headings and thematic notes, AI helps students build a mental framework for understanding key ideas and events. These summaries serve as scaffolds during reading and discussion.

Additional Tip: Translation Support

AI can also translate materials into other languages, making texts accessible to multilingual learners.

Conclusion

AI offers teachers powerful tools for personalizing reading instruction, enhancing comprehension, and ensuring equitable access to complex texts. By strategically applying these techniques, educators can help all students become more confident and capable readers.

Teaching Take-aways

Pedagogical and Instructional Implications

The core principle is equity of access—every student should engage with the same core content, supported by scaffolds that meet their current literacy level.

Student may need advance organizers that build background knowledge before reading. Summaries and “Cliff’s Notes”–style outlines introduce students to key events, characters, and themes, giving them a mental framework for comprehension. This activation of prior knowledge helps students make connections and anticipate important ideas as they read.

For student with lower reading levels, teachers can create differentiated text versions to adjust the reading level of materials while keeping all essential information intact. This approach preserves academic rigor but allows every learner to participate meaningfully in text-based activities.

Many students, if not all, will benefit from explicit vocabulary instruction, a well-established method for improving comprehension. By generating tables that identify challenging words, supply context-specific definitions, and show how each word functions in its sentence, students move beyond rote memorization to genuine understanding of the text. Encouraging students to add their own discovered words promotes metacognitive awareness of language learning.

Another key strategy is text chunking with thematic section summaries. Condensing long passages into short, titled sections helps students see structure and sequence, supporting retention and comprehension. Previewing these sections before reading further reduces cognitive load and guides attention to major ideas.

Finally, for students with diverse language backgrounds, translation tools can provide immediate linguistic access for multilingual learners, ensuring that comprehension of ideas is not hindered by language barriers.

AI Support and Use

Teachers can use AI tools to quickly create scaffolds that make complex texts accessible without reducing academic rigor.

Build background knowledge: Use AI to generate short summaries or “Cliff’s Notes” versions of readings that highlight key ideas, characters, and themes. Share these before reading to activate prior knowledge and set a purpose for learning.
Differentiate text levels: Ask AI to rewrite a passage at specific grade or Lexile levels so all students can engage with the same content at an appropriate reading level.
Teach vocabulary effectively: Have AI identify challenging words, create kid-friendly definitions, and generate example sentences that show meaning in context. Provide this as a vocabulary resource before reading.
Chunk and summarize: Use AI to divide long texts into shorter, titled sections with concise summaries of events and themes. These section overviews guide students through structure and comprehension.
Support multilingual learners: Ask AI to translate key passages or summaries to support understanding for students who are developing English proficiency.

These AI-assisted strategies save preparation time while reinforcing proven instructional methods that improve comprehension, engagement, and equitable access to complex texts.

Full Transcript and Prompts

Introduction to Diverse Reading Needs

In the typical classroom, there will be students who are struggling to read the text that you give them. Whether it’s literary text or informative text, whatever the case may be, their reading abilities are just not sufficient to fully comprehend and engage in the text. And that can be in any content area.

So, we’ve got a few options.

One is we can say, “Well, tough luck. That’s the text I’ve got for you. Just do your best.” And we set them up for failure.
Option two is we say, “Well, we’ll do something else for you kids. This activity isn’t for you or this isn’t for you.” And that’s no good either.
Option three is the best option, which is to say, look, if the kids’ reading ability isn’t sufficient for the text, let’s modify the text [and resources] so that the students can fully engage, understand, and participate.

So, we’re going to do this in a series of prompts using AI.

Getting Started: Provide the text to AI

And the very first thing that we’ve got to do is we’ve got to get the text in there. Now, I’m using Animal Farm, which is literary text. And a few of these prompts are going to be specific to literature, but several of them will also work across all content areas.

So the very first thing, review it. And then just as a check for understanding, create me a little synopsis. I will take that synopsis and share it with the kids. So let’s see what we’ve got.

I’ve already run these because ChatGPT is running a bit slowly today.

Prompt

Review the uploaded chapter from Animal Farm. Provide a brief synopsis of the chapter.

So there’s my prompt, and it gave me a nice synopsis which I will share with the students. Here’s what it’s going to be about. Here’s what we’re going to be studying, and we’re going to learn some things from it. Okay, so that’s one.

Strategy 1: Prepare a Text Synopsis

Now let’s actually start looking at some modification strategies. And the next prompt, prepare a Cliff’s notes, Cliff’s notes version complete with all the stuff that’s typically in there.

Prompt

Prepare a Cliff’s Notes version of the chapter, complete with all the components that Cliff’s Notes typically include.

And if you’ve been to college anytime in the last 50 years or so, you have probably seen Cliff’s notes. I need it. It’s going to give me a synopsis, key events, people, quotes, themes, all of that kind of stuff.

And what it helps the students to do is start building a mental framework and mental buckets in which they can store information and to give them an understanding of facts, events and people so that when they encounter them in the text, they have a much better chance to see how what the text is about and how they are applied within the text.

So we haven’t necessarily modified the text here. What we’re doing is we’re helping to create the mental framework that will lead to comprehension. All right. So, give me that clips notes.

And here it is. So, I’ve got my summary. I’ve got my characters. I’ve got my analysis of the chapter. I’ve got key themes, which we’re going to explore later. Symbols, key quotes, and even some study questions, which I might look at with the students. I might give them now and then we’ll talk about them after we read.

Okay. So that is the next strategy. So let’s move on.

Strategy 2: Revise the Reading Level

So eventually we want all kids to raise their reading achievement abilities, right? But if it’s currently prohibiting them from engaging in the text, in the meantime, if we can’t get the kids up immediately for the text, let’s bring the text down to their reading ability.

All the same information, all the same stuff, but more appropriate for the kids.

Prompt

Rewrite the chapter to be appropriate for average 6th grade students. [lexile 1030]

So, what we’re going to ask the AI to do is simply rewrite it to be appropriate for…and then you would put in where the kids are.

And you can do two, three, four, five, six different versions depending on what your students need. And just as an FYI, instead of grade levels, you could just put in an actual Lexile level, but here I used grade levels. So when I did that, rewrite it.

And what it’s going to give me is a new version of the same text for that grade level in any content area.

I can do this simplified. It’s all still there, which means the students can still fully participate in all the learning opportunities around this text. Great. Great stuff. All right, next prompt.

Strategy 3: Vocabulary Support

Sometimes it’s just the words. The reading is there, but the kids don’t understand the words, and the words are prohibiting understanding the text. So let’s do something with the words.

We know very clearly that when we study challenging words before studying the text with those words, vocabulary goes up and reading comprehension goes up. It is a best strategy for helping kids to make sense of text. Study the words first.

So we need a resource.

Prompt

I need a teaching resource on vocabulary in the chapter. For this resource, create a 3-column table, as follows:

Column 1 = potentially challenging words for students with limited exposure to literature and the context of the story.

Column 2 = kid-friendly definitions for each identified term.

Column 3 = the original sentence from the story in which the word is used. Then the same sentence with the word replaced by the definition.

Create 5 additional table rows for students to fill in their own found challenging words.

We need a little teaching resource on challenging vocabulary, and I needed to be in three columns.

Column one, find some tough words for students who limited exposure to literature in the context, etc. Okay.
Column two, give me a kid-friendly definition. (And frankly, the old approach of go get the dictionary or look it up online isn’t a good one because a lot of words have multiple meanings which may or may not be relevant to the text.) So give me a good kid-friendly definition for the words as they’re used in the text.
And then in column three, where is the word? So when we encounter it in the text, we’ll say, “Oh, there it is.” Give me the original sentence that the word comes from. And give me the same sentence again, but use the definition and not the original word.
And then give me some additional rows for students to fill in their own words, which we can study after, and let the kids teach us some new words as well.

So let’s take a look at what we’ve got from that.

Okay, so we have a nice table here. “Ensconced” means it’s settled in a safe and comfortable place. And then you’ll see we’ve got our original sentence over here with the word in it. And we have a version of the sentence with the definition. We say, “Oh, so that’s how you use the word.”

That is a very strong strategy.

And down, down there should be some blanks. There’s the blanks.

And do you want to download it? Yes, we would do that. We’ll let the kids work on it.

Strategy 4: Section Summaries

Okay. Now, the final prompt that we’re going to look at is more literature-based.

Take the whole thing, take the text and break it into meaningful chunks, meaningful sections with a heading.

Prompt

Condense the chapter into a series of short section summaries with headings. Include major events of the section. If the section introduces a theme, describe the theme.

And what it’s doing is it’s creating a series of receptacles in the brain into which students can put the facts and details as they read them.

So, I need a chapter in a series of short section summaries with headings. I want the major events for that section. And if it introduces a theme or some a concept, tell me what that is. So, let’s see what we get.

And this is a great way to help kids prepare for reading and begin to make sense of all of the content that’s in the text we’re giving them.

So sections: Jones at Manor Farm. We’ve got some key events and a little bit about the theme, an early theme, major events. And now we’ve got a way that the students can make sense of this block of text that we give to them.

We would give them this before they read so they can use it as a reference and a mental framework when they read. We might even discuss it as a class, but certainly they need to have access to this before they begin reading.

Conclusion

And those are strategies for helping struggling readers make sense of the text we give them.

I will throw in one last thing. AI is good at translating also. So that is something to definitely keep in mind.

Take care.