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.