How speech pathology treats literacy difficulties
What is a literacy difficulty?
“Literacy difficulties often appear with children making very slow or no improvements despite practice at home and at school”
What does a literacy difficulty look like?
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 that 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
“It is never too early to seek support”
How literacy difficulties impact different skill areas
Difficulty with Phonological awareness:
Difficulties with phonics:
Difficulties with sight words:
Difficulties with vocabulary:
When to seek help?
How Talkshop Speech Pathology can help
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.
Comprehensive Literacy Assessment
Reading assessment
Writing and Spelling Assessment
“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”
Literacy Therapy
Phonological awareness
Synthetic Phonics
Reading Fluency and Accuracy
Reading Comprehension
Spelling
Writing
NAPLAN
“We use an research based hybrid language intervention approach”
References
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