Language and Learning Skills Your Child Needs

A Reader and Writer needs to have a full set of skills in place to be proficient. Some of these skills are based on Language Development and some are Cognitive-learning Abilities.
 
These are some of the Language Skills
            *Phonological Awareness
            *Vocabulary
            *Knowledge of Sentences
            *Comprehension
            *Higher-level Language and Metalinguistics
 
Cognitive-learning Abilities that relate to Literacy are
            *Retrieval
            *Working Memory
            *Organizational Skills
 
Every child – at any age – has a profile of strengths and weaknesses in all of these areas. A student who may possess a Language-Based Learning Disability, such as Dyslexia, will have some specific areas of weakness that have impacted her development of Reading and Writing.
 
Your child’s combination of strengths and weaknesses in Language and Cognitive abilities leads to the Literacy Skills you see every day in your child.
 
These Literacy Skills include
-Decoding                                                       -Word Attack (of multi-syllable words)
-Sight Word Recall                                    -Awareness of Context Clues
-Reading Fluency                                       -Reading Comprehension
-Monitoring Comprehension              -Critical Thinking
-Spelling (also called Encoding)       -Sentence & Paragraph construction
 
A Kindergarten student needs to have a different balance of skills and abilities in place than a Middle School student or a High Schooler, but every student ultimately needs all of these skills (and others, as well).
 
During the next several Blogs, we will try to address each of these Language and Cognitive-learning abilities, and how they impact Literacy. Blogs from October 29th, November 13th, and December 12th related directly to Phonological Awareness. Please refer to those dates to read more about this crucial language skill.
 
Determining a child’s strengths and weaknesses - in both Language and Cognitive-learning - are fundamental to clearly identifying a Language-Based Learning Disability, such as Dyslexia. Please  contact us at Linguistic Foundations if you would like to speak about your child or if you would like to learn more about the assessment services we provide. Thank you very much!