Classroom Support of Literacy Development for Students Demonstrating Underlying Language and Phonological Deficits

Introductions About Course Instructor About Class Participants: Tell about yourself and the students you teach Review course syllabus

20-30% of American children find learning to read an arduous task (Lyon, 1995a) 40% of U.S. 4 th graders scored below the basic level on the 1994 Nat’l Assessment of Educational Progress Approximately 10 million students experience problems learning to read (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (2000)

Children entering kindergarten may have a vocabulary gap of eight years, even before they begin school. The average middle-income child has 1200 hours of being read aloud to, compared to 25 hours for low income children Katz, L. The Importance of Investing in Literacy. (1999).Children’s Literacy Initiative funded by the US Department of Education, Philadelphia, PA.

There are some early signs that may place a child at risk for the acquisition of literacy skills. Preschool children with speech and language disorders often experience problems learning to read and write when they enter school. Other factors include physical or medical conditions (e.g., preterm birth requiring placement in a neonatal intensive care unit, chronic ear infections, fetal alcohol syndrome, cerebral palsy), developmental disorders (e.g., mental retardation, autism spectrum), poverty, home literacy environment, and family history of language or literacy disabilities. Roth, F.P., Paul, D.R. & Pierotti, A. Let’s Talk: For Pepole with Special Communication Needs, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), 2006

Signs that may indicate later reading and writing and learning problems include persistent baby talk, absence of interest in or appreciation for nursery rhymes or shared book reading, difficulty understanding simple directions, difficulty learning (or remembering) names of letters, failure to recognize or identify letters in the child's own name. Roth, F.P., Paul, D.R. & Pierotti, A. Let’s Talk: For Pepole with Special Communication Needs, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), 2006

The experiences with talking and listening gained during the preschool period prepare children to learn to read and write during the early elementary school years. This means that children who enter school with weaker verbal abilities are much more likely to experience difficulties learning literacy skills than those who do not. Roth, F.P., Paul, D.R. & Pierotti, A. Let’s Talk: For Pepole with Special Communication Needs, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), 2006

Students with a history of verbal language problems that evolved into written language problems “often fail to process and comprehend the information because of their poor mastery of semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic aspects of language” (Norris, 1991, p.71) Strong evidence indicates that children with oral language problems are at risk for reading and writing problems, and if left untreated, become prone to academic failure throughout their school years, from preschool to postsecondary setting. Butler (2000)

1.According to NICHD “the best predictor in K or 1 st grade of a future reading disability in grade 3 is a combination of performance on measures of phonemic awareness, rapid naming of letters, numbers, and objects, and print awareness” (Grossen, 1997) 2.Five kindergarten variables predicted reading outcome in second grade: letter identification, sentence imitation, phonological awareness, rapid naming, and mother’s education (Catts et al. (2001)

Poor readers frequently score lower than good readers on verbal short-term memory, verbal working memory, and speech production tasks. (Goldsworthy, 2003,p.6) The ability to rapidly name a small number of items (colors, numbers, letters or objects) as quickly as possible has proven to be one of the best predictors of a student’s printed word recognition Phonological awareness and rapid-naming deficits lie near the core of reading disabilities in young children (Catts, 1993)

A substantial body of research now supports the relationships among phonological awareness, reading acquisition, and developmental reading disabilities. Spoken and written language are no longer viewed as separate skills or parallel processes in different modalities (Kavanagh, 1991)

Cushen-White (2000) pointed out that over 33 years of NICHD-supported research has demonstrated that “for 90% to 95% of poor readers, prevention and early intervention programs that combine instruction in phoneme awareness, phonics, fluency development, and reading comprehension strategies, provided by well-trained teachers, can increase reading skills to average reading levels

Children start to learn language from the day they are born. As they grow and develop, their speech and language skills become increasingly more complex. They learn to understand and use language to express their ideas, thoughts, and feelings, and to communicate with others. During early speech and language development, children learn skills that are important to the development of literacy (reading and writing). This stage, known as emergent literacy, begins at birth and continues through the preschool years Roth, F.P., Paul, D.R. & Pierotti, A. Let’s Talk: For People with Special Communication Needs, American Speech- Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), 2006