Concerned about your child’s literacy skills?

Why do children have difficulties with literacy?

About 10% of children have difficulty learning to read and write. There are many reasons for this, some of which include:

• Medical conditions such as chronic ear infections, glue ear or hearing loss.

• Underlying speech and language difficulties.

• Diagnosed learning disabilities.

• Poor attendance or interrupted schooling due to COVID or chronic health conditions.

• Acquiring English as an additional language as they learn to read and write. These children are likely to catch up as they become more skilled in English.

• Difficulty acquiring literacy skills at the same pace as their peers with no known cause. These children can often have excellent verbal skills and excel in other areas of their learning. However, they continue to experience specific difficulties with reading and/or writing despite consistent attendance, good-quality instruction and sufficient time to develop their skills. For these children, it is helpful to obtain a profile of their learning strengths and needs through a full educational assessment that includes measures of academic attainment and underlying cognitive skills such as processing speed and working memory capacity. This assessment is usually completed by an educational psychologist.

Why is it important to intervene early?

Learning in the classroom can induce a great deal of anxiety for a child who is unable to accurately read instructions on the board, read and understand the questions on a worksheet, or read the tabs on their laptop. These students often experience exhaustion and become overwhelmed from working twice as hard as their peers for a lesser result. When literacy difficulties persist, they can begin to have a significant impact on motivation and self-esteem. In the longer-term there is a significant risk that these difficulties may impact on academic performance, peer relationships, behaviour and limited employment opportunities.

Intervening early can help children make faster gains and reduce the risk of a child’s difficulties becoming more severe.

Why should I see a Speech and Language Therapist to support my child with literacy difficulties?

Reading and writing, put simply, is spoken language written down on paper. Speech and language therapists are experts in language, communication, and phonological (sound) processing. Therefore, they are an essential part of the literacy team. Given that almost all children with dyslexia or difficulties acquiring literacy skills have underlying difficulties in one or more of these areas, the specialist knowledge speech and language therapists have in these areas makes them well-equipped to assess and provide the direct, explicit and targeted intervention that may be needed. This could include advice or therapy input to support a child’s oral language skills, phonological (sound) awareness skills, or reading, spelling and writing skills.

What signs should I look out for?

Some children may show signs of speech and language difficulties that put them at risk of developing literacy difficulties before they even start school. This can often be the case when there is a history of specific learning differences in the family.

Seeking help from a speech and language therapist at this early stage can be highly beneficial if your child:

• Was late to start talking.

• Has difficulty learning and remembering words.

• Needs help to understand instructions.

• Has difficulty expressing simple ideas clearly.

• Doesn’t seem to be able to listen to a full story.

• Can be challenging to understand and has a history of unclear speech that was present for much longer than was expected.

• Has had difficulty learning and reciting nursery rhymes.

• Has difficulty repeating new words clearly.

• Doesn’t seem to be remembering the sounds to match alphabet letters.

In the first couple of years at school, some of the signs could be:

• Struggling to retrieve names or spoken words in conversation.

• Mispronouncing words with several syllables (e.g. computer, animals, pacific).

• Difficulty repeating and holding spoken sentences in memory when writing simple sentences to dictation.

• Using immature sentence structure or grammar (e.g. “Her goed to the park”).

• Difficulty organising and sequencing ideas to re-tell a story or provide a clear and coherent narrative.

• Difficulty learning letter-sounds or struggling to blend sounds together.

• Guessing what words say rather than attempting to decode them.

• Particular reluctance to write or pronounced difficulties with spelling in particular.

In the later primary years you may notice your child may be struggling to:

• Read class-based texts accurately or fluently.

• Be able to summarise or explain the main points from what has been read.

• Understand and use relevant curriculum-specific vocabulary.

• ‘Read-between-the-lines’ to make appropriate, unstated inferences.

• Clearly explain their reasoning, their predictions and the connections they’ve made in terms of similarities and differences.

• Structure and explain their ideas when generating an oral narrative, a set of instructions or a piece of extended writing.

• Use appropriate sentence structure and grammar such as consistent tense throughout their writing.

• Use basic punctuation, correct word order or a range of spelling strategies.

What knowledge does my child need at the very start of their journey to becoming literate?

To lay the foundations for success with reading and writing, children need to understand these basic concepts:

• Letters represent the sounds they hear and say.

• A sound can be spelled by 1, 2, 3, or 4 letters”

      Dog          street            night              dough

• The same sound can be spelled in more than one way:

      rain          break           gate              stay

• A team of letters can represent more than one sound:

      head          seat         break

Who can I contact for help?

If you have concerns about your child’s literacy skills, it is best to approach your child’s teacher and the Special Education Needs Coordinator at school initially. If the school shares your concerns, they can provide advice regarding in-school support that might be appropriate for your child’s needs. You may also wish to discuss with the school whether your child’s needs would meet criteria for a referral to outside agencies that specialise in supporting children with literacy needs such as the Ministry of Education’s Resource Teacher for Learning and Behaviour (RTLB) or Resource Teacher for Literacy (RTLit) service. If you are not satisfied that your child is receiving the support he or she requires after raising your concerns with the school, you can seek support privately through SPELD, a tutor who specialises in structured literacy, or other professionals such as speech and language therapists who have completed specialist training in teaching reading and writing through a recognised structured literacy approach.