Literacy difficulties and dyslexia 

Is your child struggling to progress at school?  Are they having difficulties with reading, writing or spelling? Would you like to find out why your child is struggling and what you can do to help?  Speech pathologists at Talking Matters can assess your child's learning strengths and weaknesses and provide a range of options for developing their skills.  Contact us to find out how.   

Reading and writing skills are strongly tied to communication skills. Children are sometimes considered to have dyslexia if they are not fluent readers and spellers and yet appear to be of at least average intelligence and their reading and writing difficulties cannot be explained by other learning difficulties or disability.  These difficulties often are linked to difficulties with language based skills such as phonological awareness (ability to understand sound patterns in words).

In order to read children need to be able to:

• recognise letters and relate them to the sound they make
• blend a string of sounds together to make a word
• recognise whole words that cannot be sounded out such as "was"
• understand the meaning of individual words
• remember a string of words and understand their meaning within a sentence
• relate the different sentences to each other   

In order to write children need to:

• think of a sentence
• break it into individual words
• break each word into individual sounds
• relate the sound to a letter shape and write this
• write a series of letter shapes in the correct sequence for each word
• form a series of words to make a sentence
• link a series of sentences to make a text   
• remember to use grammatical markers and punctuation

Children with language and sometimes speech difficulties can find some or many of these tasks difficult. Therapy to develop their speech, language and phonological awareness skills usually helps with their development of literacy skills.  Talking Matters also have individual reading support and small group sessions to support children with literacy difficulties. Children should see a speech pathologist early if they are having difficulties learning to read or spell so they can receive help before they get too far behind so contact us now.