Chapter 8: Literacy Disorders in Children

• Literacy (reading, writing)


  The ability to communicate through written language, both reading & writing
• Emergent Literacy (Preliteracy) Skills


  Early skills developed in the preschool years that precede or are presumed prerequisites for later-developing reading and writing skills
• Alphabetic Principle


  Letters and combinations of letters represent speech sounds; speech can be turned into print and print can be turned into speech
• 3 main differences in learning to understand speech vs read

  1. Human auditory perceptual system is biologically adapted to process spoken words
  2. Learning to talk is caught, learning to read is taught. No biological adaptation.
  3. Reading depends on children's relative proficiency in all aspects of language, not just phonology.
• Scaffolding


  support that adults provide to children for them to achieve competence in an activity (e.g. reading & writing), with the support gradually removed until the child is able to perform independently
• Phonological Awareness


  recognition and understanding of sound-letter associations; that individual sounds can be combined to form words; that a single-syllable word is heard as one word but can be segmented into its beginning, middle, and ending sounds; and that longer words have more "middle" sounds
• Phonics Method


  a method for teaching reading and writing of the English language by developing learners' phonemic awareness – the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes - in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them
• Orthography


  the learning of printing and writing and the study of spelling and how letters combine to represent sounds and form words
• Conventional Literacy


  reading and writing according to the rule-governed system of the alphabetic principle and being able to read to learn
• Literacy Disorder (Diasbility)


  reading and writing impairments in a heterogeneous population of children
• Reading disability (dyslexia, developmental dyslexia)


  an inability or difficulty reading that is of neurological origin
• Dysgraphia


  a developmental motor and/or literacy disorder that affects a child's or adult's ability to write, characterized by messy or illegible handwriting, misspellings, and difficulty with grammar and organizing sentences; note: agraphia is a loss of ability to write resulting from injury to the brain