Identifying School-Age Children At-Risk for Literacy Difficulties

 The following text-based course is a transcript of the seminar, "Identifying School-Age Children At-Risk for Literacy Difficulties," presented by Angela Beckman Anthony. >> Angela Anthony:  I am very excited that speech-language pathologists are now so involved with literacy.  When I was finishing my Master’s degree, it was about the time that the ASHA roles and responsibilities of reading and writing had just been published.  As excited as I was about it, I often talked to other speech-language pathologists who had been in the field for a while and really saw this as just one more thing that we had to deal with on our caseloads.  It is very exciting for me and I am glad to be talking about it today.  I enjoyed literacy so much that after I finished my Master’s degree and was out in the field working for awhile, I chose to pursue my doctorate degree in reading education and to build my background in literacy.  I still view myself as an SLP first, not a reading specialist, although I did take most of the same coursework that a reading specialist would take.  Today I will share my experiences, as well as the theories, the concepts, and the research that I am familiar with addressing literacy difficulties for school-age children. I will cover first some risk factors for children who may experience reading difficulties.  I will spend some time talking about typical reading development and giving you some background on what to expect and what to look for in typical reading.  I will spend a few minutes talking about the roles of the speech-language pathologist in the Response to Intervention approach and tying that in with literacy.  Then I will spend much of the end of the presentation talking about target areas for screening, intervention, and progress monitoring, and what we should be considering for those children who are having difficulties in literacy.  Who is at Risk?Let's start by talking about the children at risk for literacy difficulties.  Many of the same characteristics that put a child at risk for oral language difficulties are also going to put a child at risk for reading difficulties.  If you are at all familiar with the literature in reading difficulties, you know that reading and writing builds on oral language skills.  Children have to first build that oral vocabulary and certainly those experiences in oral vocabulary lead to their future success in reading and writing.  Let's talk about the different groups of children who might be at risk.  First, children who come from low socioeconomic backgrounds are at risk. If you think about this - and we know this from oral language - those families who are in this category of low socioeconomic status have high demands of work and of maintaining the household.  There is less time for talking.  There is less time for reading.  Many of you are probably familiar with the Hart and Risley study which came out several years ago.  It looked at the exposure of young children to spoken language and found that those children in lower socioeconomic households were exposed to much less language, and in turn, had lower levels of vocabulary.  That continued over time and those children who had low exposure early on never really caught up, even over time.  The second category of risk factors is children who receive poor instruction or who are in low performing schools.  What we know about reading difficulties is that most reading problems can be avoided with age-appropriate instruction and using instruction that is evidence-based.  Poor instruction can be the key factor.  It is also important to look at how the child is being taught to read.  Unlike oral language, where many children pick it up just by being exposed, most children need very explicit instruction in learning to read.  Certainly our children who are learning English as a second language may be at risk, because of their lack of English knowledge if we are teaching them to read in English.  I will not go in depth related to this today, but certainly all of those factors that we know can impact children learning English as a second language in oral language can also have an impact on literacy.  We know that our children who have communication disorders or other learning disabilities can be impacted, because of the oral language difficulties, and children with developmental disorders as well.  We have talked a little bit already about that home literacy environment, which may be related to socioeconomic status and also may be related to the amount of literacy that happens in the home.  How much reading material is in the home?  How often do children see adults participating in literacy activities, in reading and writing?  It does not have to be reading books, but it could be reading the newspaper, or reading online.  We will talk a little bit about technology later.  Finally, if a child has a family history of language or literacy disabilities or difficulties, we may also see that the child is at higher risk for difficulties. Typical Reading DevelopmentLet’s first talk about typical reading development and what we should be seeing in children in the early grades, and what that development looks like.  As we know from our knowledge of oral language, we have to know what is typical, what we expect them to know, as well as what is disordered or not typical.  In its simplest definition, reading has two pieces: decoding and comprehension.  This is a very simplistic definition, but it is one of my favorites because it very clearly conveys the concept about learning to read.  Think about this as a math problem, multiplying decoding X comprehension, and think about if we substituted a 1 for a skill that is present and a 0 for a skill that is not present.  For example, decoding is present.  The child is able to decode, so we would call that a 1.  If they are not able to comprehend we call that a 0.  If we multiply 1 X 0,...