Literacy
What is Literacy?
Literacy refers to the skills that allow us to understand, interpret, and share ideas through written words, spoken conversations, or digital media. It includes reading, writing and spelling. Literacy involves using language, thinking critically, remembering information, problem-solving, and planning. These skills are crucial for children and adults to learn, communicate, and engage fully in school, work, and everyday life.
How Does Literacy Develop?
Literacy skills develop in a step-wise way over time. Children must learn important precursor skills before they can understand more complex literacy concepts.
Strong skills in both decoding and comprehension are vital for children to become fluent readers.
At first, a child’s spoken language skills will help them to connect meaning to written words. For example, a child may sound out the word ‘cat’ and link this with their existing knowledge about cats. As children become more competent with their literacy skills, they will then use written language to extend their spoken vocabulary. For example, a child might learn the word ‘feline’ after reading it in a book and then start to use that word in their spoken language. This is sometimes called the ‘learn to read- read to learn’ shift and shows how closely literacy and language skills are interlinked.
Pre-School
Most children start building literacy skills before they even start school. These early skills, called “pre-literacy” skills, include:
- Understanding how books work (holding them, turning pages, and following words from left to right)
- Getting familiar with the alphabet
- Learning letters and the sounds they make
- Understanding that words can be broken down into smaller sound units (such as syllables)
Foundation/Prep
In their first year of school, children begin to:
- Understand that words can be broken down into individual sounds (phonemes), which are represented by one or more letters
- Recognise that words go from left to right on the page
- Use their knowledge of letter-sound relationships to read and write simple words. Often these words will be in a Consonant-Vowel-Consonant arrangement (CVC words)
- Recognise high-frequency words (e.g., “and,” “it”)
- Write their own name and attempt story-writing
- Understand the difference between letters, words and sentences
- Develop an awareness of punctuation (full stops, question marks, capital letters) when reading and writing
Grade 1
By Grade 1, children typically have an understanding that letters are used to represent sounds in words and are able to build on this knowledge to read and write more complex words and sentences. This includes:
- Becoming aware that different sounds can be represented by different spelling choices (e.g. the long sound of ‘a’ can be written as ‘ai’ or ‘ay’).
- Hearing all sounds in words with consonant blends (e.g. understanding that ‘t’ is the second sound in the word ‘stop’)
- Understanding that sentences can be structured in different ways, depending on the type of text (e.g. recounting a story as opposed to giving an instruction)
What is Systematic Synthetic Phonics?
While we learn to speak through exposure to a rich language environment, reading and writing usually need to be explicitly taught. The alphabet is essentially a code, with letters representing certain sounds. Systematic Synthetic Phonics allows children to learn how to “crack the code”, so that they can access written information.
What is Systematic Synthetic Phonics?
Systematic
Ordered from simple to more complex concepts; follows a structured plan or system; organised; consistent.
Synthetic
Blended/joined
Phonics
The relationship between speech sounds (phonemes) and their corresponding letter or letter combinations (graphemes)
A key component of this is phonological awareness – the ability to recognise and work with sounds in words. Phonological awareness includes:
- Understanding that words are made up of individual sounds (e.g., “bat” has 3 sounds ‘b’–‘a’–‘t’)
- Breaking words into syllables (e.g., but-ter-fly)
- Recognising rhyming words (e.g., “cat” and “bat”)
- Identifying the same starting or ending sounds in words (e.g., “sat” and “sing” both start with /s/)
Systematic synthetic phonics is an evidence-based approach that benefits all learners, including those with learning difficulties like dyslexia.
There are many formalised programs that teach systematic synthetic phonics according to evidence-based approaches. Many schools are also recognising that explicit teaching of this skill is vital for children to become proficient in literacy.
A comprehensive list of programs is available through speech pathologist Alison Clarke’s website ‘Spelfabet’ https://www.spelfabet.com.au/
At Box Hill Speech Pathology, we predominantly use the ‘Sounds-Write’ program to provide support in this area. https://sounds-write.co.uk/
What are narrative skills?
Narratives, or stories, are vital tools for sharing experiences, building relationships, and enhancing comprehension skills. They help us to effectively convey our thoughts and experiences in everyday life. This can include storytelling, recounting events, or sharing personal experiences.
We use writing to preserve these stories and share them with people over time and distance.
We can support children in mastering various narrative forms, such as recounts, accounts, and stories through targeted interventions. By facilitating a deeper understanding of narrative structure, we help them to convey their thoughts clearly and cohesively, promoting positive communication with others.
For older primary school children and adolescents, the development of narrative skills becomes more complex. They learn to link events and introduce causal relationships into their storytelling.
Narrative is intricately linked to literacy skills as it requires the person to have both strong oral story-telling skills as well as strong spelling and writing skills.
What are literacy difficulties (including Dyslexia)?
Literacy difficulties can be due to a range of different factors. These include:
- Difficulty with phonics and letter-sound correspondence
- Difficulty with oral language skills (understanding or giving information)
- Difficulty with social inference skills (understanding implied meaning in texts)
- Difficulty with written letter formation due to limited physical strength or coordination
People most commonly associate literacy difficulties with dyslexia.
Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects reading. People with dyslexia have differences in the way that their brains process the sounds in words (phonological awareness) and how quickly they are able to process this information (fluency).
It often occurs alongside dysgraphia (difficulty with written expression) and dyscalculia (difficulty with mathematics).
Diagnosis
Dyslexia is usually diagnosed by an Educational Psychologist, but specially-trained Speech Pathologists may also make a diagnosis. Dyslexia is a type of Specific Learning Disorder and is diagnosed using criteria in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual).
There is no specific test for dyslexia. Educational Psychologists and Speech Pathologists will use a range of different assessments to gather information about the person’s reading skills. An important part of the criteria is that the person must have had reading difficulties for at least 6 months, despite evidence-based targeted intervention.
There is often confusion or disagreement between professionals about how best to diagnose dyslexia. Here are some of the factors that make it challenging:
- Changing diagnostic criteria. Dyslexia used to be diagnosed only if a person’s IQ score was above a certain level (meaning that the difficulties were specific to reading and did not affect other areas of learning). This has now changed and people can be diagnosed with dyslexia regardless of their IQ score.
- No specific cut-off points. The DSM-5 does not specify what ‘evidence-based targeted intervention’ must involve or how frequently the person needs to be receiving intervention.
- No specific characteristics. Contrary to what many people think, characteristics like letter reversals, or writing backwards, are not ‘official criteria’ for a dyslexia diagnosis.
- No defined levels of severity. Dyslexia can look very different for different people. Some people might have only mild difficulties with reading, whereas others might be very significantly affected by literacy difficulties.
- Co-occurring conditions. People with reading difficulties might also have difficulties in other areas. These need to be properly assessed to determine whether other factors might be impacting a person’s reading ability (e.g. ADHD or a language disorder).
Intervention
Explicit systematic phonics interventions are the most effective type of intervention for people with dyslexia or those who are showing early signs of dyslexia. This involves teaching the relationship between letters and sounds, and understanding that words can be broken down into individual sounds. People with dyslexia need more practice with these skills to become fluent/automatic readers, compared to others.
For older students and adults with dyslexia, it is important to acknowledge that reading and spelling is much more effortful and time consuming. Technology such as audiobooks/read aloud programs, and dictation/speech-to-text software can be useful when the person has to read or write large amounts of text.
Key Points
- Regardless of whether a person has an official diagnosis of dyslexia or not, they can still improve their reading and spelling skills through an explicit systematic phonics approach.
- For some families, receiving an official diagnosis of dyslexia can provide relief or validation but this can also be an expensive process. A dyslexia diagnosis generally does not allow access to any extra school funding and does not meet criteria for NDIS funding.
How do speech pathologists support literacy skill development?
Speech pathologists might:
- Conduct a comprehensive assessment to determine the specific factors that are impacting the person’s progress (for example, identifying if there is weakness in phonological awareness or comprehension skills)
- Provide a specific therapy approach to support the areas in which the person needs to learn new skills
- Liaise with schools to provide recommendations on evidence-based programs to support literacy development
At Box Hill Speech Pathology, we believe in offering a range of evidence-based therapy options for both children and adults.
Please head to our contact page for more information or call 9899 5494 to book an initial consultation.