Preventing Reading Disabilities Through Early Intervention
Abstract:The preschool years play a crucial role in children’s literacy development. According to a report, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young children, Children who are at risk for having difficulties with language and literacy should be identified early and given extra support.1 This webpage is a resource for early childhood educators. This webpage will explain the skills children need to have in order to read and the importance of helping children acquire these skills before they even start elementary school. This webpage gives ideas for ways that early childhood educators can help children develop these skills in their classrooms.
Characteristics of Children With Reading Disabilities: Children with reading disabilities read at a level that is one to two years lower than the level that would be expected based on their age, IQ, and social standing.7 They tend to have issues with “phoneme awareness, morpheme awareness, and three aspects of language processing skill: speech perception under difficult listening conditions, vocabulary, especially when measured in terms of naming ability,, and using phonetic representation in linguistic short-term memory”7 The problem they have with phonemic awareness causes them to have trouble recognizing words.. They cannot understand what letters stand for because they do not understand the alphabetic principle: “the notion that our written symbols systematically represent the smallest meaningful speech elements that make up the pronunciation of a word.” Children with reading disabilities also have trouble learning that particular letters correspond to particular phonemes and thus have trouble pronouncing written words. This difficulty with decoding means that these children have trouble matching the pronunciation of a written word to words in their memory of spoken words, so they cannot recognize the written word. A very slow speed at processing words and thus impaired reading comprehension is also characteristic of children with reading disabilities. These children usually have a stable level of reading achievement throughout their lives, so even with intervention in the school years, they still have difficulty with reading.3
Table of Contents Importance of Early Intervention Skills Children Need to be Able to Read