icommunicate Guide Child Information Disorders & Delays Literacy Difficulties
| Dyslexia and Literacy Difficulties |
 |
 |
|
Dyslexia is a disorder that causes reading, writing and spelling difficulties, and is a problem encountered by many children. Speech and language delay is often the first sign that your child might have reading difficulties. Dyslexia and literacy difficulties can be caused by a number of factors and consequently there are a number of different programs to help with reading. When assessing reading difficulties we must differentiate between "slow readers", who are in line with their general cognitive development, and those with specific reading difficulties. Most reading programmes and strategies encompass phonological awareness. Phonological development describes the process where the child learns news sounds, stores them, and can access them to form words correctly. This is a very complex system and is linked to the child being able to organise and discriminate new sounds. The ability to recognise, blend and segment these phonemes is critical to the development of decoding and spelling skills. Some children with good language skills can compensate for reading difficulties and can use context to help them understand a sentence. Those with poor oral language skills and a literacy difficulty will find it harder to compensate and so reading will be much harder. Early intervention is critical, as is an exposure to books from a young age. Evidence shows that children who have access to many books prior to school often acquire literacy skils more quickly in the early years at school and this gives them a further advantage when they come to learn other subjects. There is often a genetic link to reading difficulties, so parents who had or have literacy problems should be aware that their children may need extra help with literacy learning. Phonological awareness Difficulties with phonological awareness are also a common reason why children have speech problems and so speech and literacy difficulties often coexist. Literacy difficulties that are the result of a phonological disorder may involve a program of different auditory discrimination tasks of words and sounds. Phonological awareness therapy focuses on discriminating between sounds, matching sounds to letters, blending sounds to make words, and being able to retrieve words at the appropriate time.icommunicate will be developing resources and activities to help develop your child’s phonological skills. Keep checking the site throughout 2009-2010. Dyslexia Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty, which presents as a difficulty with reading, writing and spelling. Dyslexia is not an intellectual difficulty, but rather a dyslexic child may have a specific difficulty with literacy, although other co-occuring difficulties are often present, such as language delay, word finding difficulties, and problems with short term verbal memory. Some children present with different "types" of dyslexia, some having difficulties with irregular words, or non-words, or being able to read words, but not comprehend the meaning. Many programmes include phonological awareness training (as mentioned above). Programmes There are a number of programmes which focus on the remediation of literacy difficulties:
For more Information and resources relating to literacy difficulties, speech and language difficulties, and communication development, visit our Resource Centre. You can also look at, and purchase a large variety of books relating to literacy difficulties, literacy development, and communication at our Online BookShop. |
