Literacy Difficulties

How did we learn to read? We may have memories of reading at home or spelling tests in class, but how were we taught. If we are now the adult helping a child with their literacy development, how do we teach them to read and write?

What happens when you’ve practiced the same word one hundred times and your child still looks at the word and trying to sound it out (again) as if they’ve never seen it before. And ‘who’ is still sounded out as “wer-her-o”.

Or, if your child is older now, in upper primary or in high school their poor reading abilities means that they are struggling in other subjects that rely on them reading at a fast pace to digest and analyse the information. Their language skills are not as practiced as they have generally avoided reading where possible. So now organising language and producing different types of texts for different assignments are now hard. Naplan year is additionally stressful.

According to the NSW Education Standard Authority (NESA) a child completing Kindergarten should be able to demonstrate developing skills to read and comprehend short, predictable texts on familiar topics^[1]. This includes understanding when to use future tense or past tense, or using ‘s’ at the end of words for plurals, letter-sound relationships in words, phonological awareness, and the ability to understand and respond to the texts they are reading.

Speech pathology assessments can help pinpoint the source(s) of the literacy struggles. We can determine a therapy management plan to target the specific areas to make all the processes for literacy come together.

At Talkshop Speech Pathology we have a Reading Clinic. This is a dedicated stream of our speech pathology service for children and adolescents with literacy difficulties. You can find out more about how we help adolescent literacy difficulties in particular.

Literacy difficulties often present differently for each child. Typically literacy difficulty may appear as an unusual level of difficulty learning letter-sound relationships, struggling to remember sight words, difficulty recalling and using word attack strategies like chunking, segmenting (breaking down words into component sounds) and blending sounds together to read words. Difficulties often appear with children making very slow or no improvements despite practice at home and at school.

Literacy difficulties often result in ongoing reading and writing difficulties. Children struggling in these areas may also have difficulty with reading comprehension, writing sentences and stories. As they progress through their education they may have difficulty producing the required amount of content and writing different text types according to their year level curriculum.

• There are typical behaviours at different stages in school.
• Kindergarten and Year 1 literacy difficulties:
• Difficulties learning sounds of letters
• Difficulties identifying letters
• Letter combinations are difficult recall: ‘ng’ ‘ch’ ‘oa’ ‘ai’
• Slow to learn sight words  – especially those which you can’t sound out
• Forgetting words which have just been prompted on a page
• Difficulties blending sounds in words
• Slow to progress through reading levels
• Mid primary literacy difficulties:
• Struggles with blending
• Slow/ laboured /effortful reading
• Reading with lots of hesitations/stops
• Forgets words which have just been practiced
• Does not understand what has been read as has been focused on decoding
• Struggles with maths, as some questions are written
• Spelling difficulties
• Writing shorter amounts than others when writing short stories
• May struggle with grammar due to focusing on language and:
• Struggles with computer based tasks – where they need to read to navigate
• In low reading group
• May need additional school support
• Dislikes reading/ has low esteem around reading Upper primary and high school literacy difficulties
• Reading is slow/effortful
• Difficulties understanding and interpreting tasks
• Unable to grasp nuance in texts or questions to analyse information
• Difficulties adapting writing style for different written activities.
• Unable to formulate and organise ideas for written assignments
• Taking additional time for assignments/ or not handed in

Literacy requires the development of skills across a number of areas. Children who have literacy difficulties may have impairments across one or many of the following areas:

1. Difficulties with phonological awareness:
   This will appear as difficulty identifying sounds in words, segmenting words into their individual sounds and blending sounds together to form a word. The ability to decode new and unfamiliar words relies on the ability to identify individual sounds in a word and blend them together as a real word.These children typically have difficulty reading and manipulating the sounds within them particularly in longer words or words with clusters of letters together^[2], such as ‘scream’. This is due to them still developing their awareness of the component sounds within words.
2. Difficulties with phonics:
   This will appear as difficulty learning letter-sound relationships or developing the knowledge of how letters of the alphabet are related to the sounds of language. This will impact a child’s ability to decode familiar and unfamiliar words, and to manipulate letters to assist with developing reading speed, fluency and accuracy. An often used strategy asking a child to ‘guess’ the word from context does not help a child to read or address underlying literacy skills deficits. These children often have weak word attack strategies and have very low reading fluency and accuracy.
3. Difficulties with sight words:
   Sight words, rocket words, camera words, magic 100 words. These are all names for words that do not fit the typical rule-based patterns of spelling in English. These words can’t be sounded out and must be memorised. Children with working memory or auditory processing difficulties can often have difficulties learning and recalling their sight words. Children who have difficulties recalling these words will have slow and inefficient reading skills.
4. Difficulties with vocabulary:
   Reading ability also relies on a child’s strength and knowledge of vocabulary. Difficulties learning and recalling new and unfamiliar words and retrieving words efficiently from their memory is directly related to the ability to recall information and to read and spell efficiently.

Children with vocabulary difficulties will either appear as talkative children who give too much information yet somehow their overall meaning is difficult to understand, or as children whose spoken language seems a bit disorganised and they use lots of non-specific words like “thingy” and “stuff”.

When children with vocabulary difficulties and literacy difficulties are reading, the prevalent features are difficulty reading and recalling words even with repeated practice and exposure.

Learning to read and write is a huge task for children. Each child learns and develops at their own rate and your child’s teacher will be able to give you guidance on their achievements and progress in literacy development.

If your child is demonstrating awareness of their difficulties compared to other children or there is a history of reading or writing difficulties in your family it is never too early to seek support.

Evidence has documented greater improvements in children’s literacy skills when therapy is provided in preschool or kindergarten compared to early primary years^[3]. This really means the sooner the better!

Children with speech or language difficulties are slower to develop their phonological and phonemic awareness skills^[4]. Studies have shown that almost half of the children with a pre-existing language disorder developed a reading disorder by Year 2^[5]. This means the identification and support of literacy skills is vital. If your child has experienced speech or language difficulties it is likely they will need an assessment of their literacy skills in the year before school.

Due to the numbers of young children and adolescents with literacy concerns affecting academic success, we have a dedicated Reading Clinic which forms part of our speech pathology service.

Using standardised and informal assessment tools we assess phonological processing, vocabulary, and reading and spelling skills based on the Dual Routes of Reading and Spelling model^[6]. The level to which we assess skills will depend on your child’s age and how they progress through the assessments.

For reading we look at your child’s single-word, sentence, paragraph and story reading to review their accuracy, fluency and speed in addition to comprehension. For writing, we look at spelling, grammar, writing structure, organisation of ideas, ability to write in a way that is relevant to the task. An important area we also assess is ‘oral language’, because if they can’t say it, they can’t write it! We also review their general attention to punctuation and abilities to proofread and correct errors. These assessments give us information about their overall processing skills.

A thorough assessment allows us to identify your child’s specific areas of strength and to pinpoint the area(s) of breakdown in their literacy skills. From this, we develop an individualised therapy management plan with goals short-term and medium-term goals. We will happily collaborate with your child’s teacher to aid strategies that can be used in the classroom to support success within school. Over time reviews and re-assessments will be completed to track their progress and improvements.

When we are working on the areas of breakdown as identified through the assessment process, we are often working on multiple skill areas simultaneously. At Talkshop we use an research based hybrid language intervention approach^[7][8]  that targets vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness skills within the context of oral narrative, texts and storybook reading, and drill based games to impact language and literacy change.

The following skills are most commonly targeted in therapy:

1. Phonological awareness
   Phonological awareness skills are the foundational skills for successfully learning to read and write. By targeting these skills we are focused on children learning how words are made up of a series of smaller sounds.  Children also develop their ability to blend, segment and manipulate the sounds within words.
2. Synthetic Phonics
   By using SPALDING children receive systematic instruction of letter-sound correspondences and decoding strategies. Drills are provided in real and made up words during reading and writing activities. Evidence supports this is the most effective method for improving literacy skills of children and adolescents with reading difficulties^[9].
3. Reading Fluency and Accuracy
   The most obvious indicator of a child’s reading skill is their reading fluency and accuracy^[10]. Our comprehensive literacy assessment allows us to identify the root cause of a child’s reading difficulties. By targeting phonological awareness and phonics, the ability to quickly decode real and made up words and improve knowledge of sight words we support children’s development and improvement of their overall reading skills.
4. Reading Comprehension
   To develop efficient comprehension children require accurate decoding, to reduce cognitive effort of trying to work out what each sound is and how to blend sounds together. Once this is more fluent, comprehension will start to follow. However, there is more to comprehension than just decoding^[11]. Deficits in spoken language may be an underlying cause in reading comprehension problems. Children with poor reading comprehension can have a range of difficulties from understanding the meaning of individual words to figurative language^[12]. Children with weak vocabularies will have poorer word retrieval. Overall, targeting improved reading comprehension often requires developing an individual oral language skills including vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure skills^[13].
   In addition to supporting oral language development, we teach reading comprehension strategies, many of which are used in NSW schools such as The Super Six Strategies. These strategies support children’s ability to analyse, interpret, connect and evaluate ideas in reading.
5. Spelling
   We teach parents strategies for helping your child learn sight words and improve spelling. These strategies work for spelling words of all levels. This means that a child can learn and soar. We see young learners experience great confidence as they learn to apply their phonological awareness and letter-sound knowledge to learn to spell words. Memory strategies and vocabulary skills are also targeted to increase a child’s knowledge of written words.
6. Writing
   We know explicit teaching of writing strategies improves children’s writing strategies^[14]. Typically children having difficulty in this area will require support to develop the quality and quantity of their written work. They may have difficulty thinking of ideas or have difficulty translating their ideas into writing.  Developing language and vocabulary around text types (exposition, discussion, narrative, procedures, information reports and poetry) supports children’s ability to plan and review their writing. Using PEEL and PETAL^[15] strategies we support the structure and content of a child’s quality and quantity of writing.
7. NAPLAN
   Children who are finding reading and writing difficult are likely to find NAPLAN testing challenging. Our dedicated reading clinic provides targeted support for NAPLAN preparation and allows children to prepare strategies and practice the skills required during their test.

Home practice

Each week families are provided with speech teaching and training on home practice. Home practice is important for consolidation of skills.

Read more about our Reading Clinic and how we can help.
Read about the link between phonological awareness and literacy success
Find out more about how we help with adolescent language difficulty