Literacy

Literacy refers to your child’s ability to read and write/type text and spell.

Pre-literacy skills including phonological awareness (awareness of sounds) and print awareness, are fundamental to developing strong literacy skills at school age. Literacy should not be confused with dyslexia; a specific learning disorder in processing sounds during spelling and reading.

Our speech pathologists are trained in assessing and treating literacy difficulties from infants to high-school-aged children.

Literacy difficulties, also referred to as reading difficulties, are becoming increasingly common amongst school-aged children. Children with language disorders and delayed speech development are at risk of developing literacy difficulties.

Literacy difficulties can present as the following:

• Difficulties with book and print concepts e.g. identifying the front of a book and words on a page
• Difficulties with letter-sound matching
• Difficulties with recognising, blending and segmenting sounds
• Difficulties with manipulating syllables (beats) in words
• Difficulties with recognising and generating rhyme
• Difficulty with reading and spelling non-words and unfamiliar words
• Difficulty with reading, retaining and/or spelling irregular words (sight words)
• Disfluent, inaccurate and/or slow reading
• Poor reading comprehension

Children can have just literacy issues or a combination of language and literacy difficulties.

The research indicates that the gold standard for the treatment of literacy difficulties is INTENSIVE, regular speech pathology intervention, delivered either individually, or in a small group, such as through our  Kindy Lit Booster program, which is designed to specifically target emergent literacy skill development.