Reading Disabilities: Why Do Some Children Have Difficulty Learning to Read? What Can Be Done About It?
Children who receive stimulating oral language and literacy experiences from birth onward appear to have an edge when it comes to vocabulary development, developing a general awareness of print and literacy concepts, understanding and the goals of reading. If young children are read to, they become exposed, in interesting and entertaining ways, to the sounds of our language. Oral language and literacy interactions open the doors to the concepts of rhyming and alliteration, and to word and language play that builds the foundation for phonemic awareness – the critical under-standing that the syllables and words that are spoken are made up of small segments of sound (phonemes). Vocabulary and oral comprehension abilities are facilitated substantially by rich oral language inter-actions with adults that might occur spontaneously in conversations and in shared picture book reading.
G. Reid Lyon
"...Because after all, written language must stand on the shoulder of oral language." - Dr. Paula Tallal
see interview: interviews/tallal
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WordFinding Difficulties and Strategies
By Kristen Mallett Bator, MS, CCCSLP
What can be done?
Below is a list of various strategies you can try in the classroom and at home to help students find the right word.
In the Classroom
· always provide a wordbox
· provide visual anchors (pictures or words on board)
· utilize graphic organizers
· play language games (Taboo, Scattegories, Password, Outburst, Catch Phrase)
· learn language across domains (semantics, morphology, phonology, syntax,
pragmatics)
· encourage writing as a way to jog memory
· teach connections explicitly do not expect incidental learning
· teach students why they are doing what they are doing
· ask the student to tell you what they are thinking whey they try to recall a word
· provide ideas for generalization across curriculum and life in general (i.e., encourage
self-cueing)
At home and in the Classroom
· give phonemic cues
“s” for Sunday
“sun” for Sunday
“sounds like Monday”
· give semantic cues
~ antonyms “it isn’t hot today, it is very _____”
~ synonyms “you could say freezing, frosty, frigid”
~ situational “when I am shivering outside I think of this word”
~ associations “ice cream, snow”
~ category “this is a temperature word”
~ morphosyntactic “this is an adjective, it is a one syllable word”
~ cloze sentence “please put on your hat and coat because it is very ____”
~ serial cueing “January, February, March, ______”
· encourage visualization
· encourage visual/morphological awareness (is it a long word, or a short word?)
· provide the first letter and tap out the number of syllables
· encourage gestures
· give a choice between two things
· encourage selfcueing
~ “give me the opposite and I’ll help you”
~ “what does it start with”
~ “where have you seen it before?”
~ “tell me what it looks like”
~ “try writing it down”
