Literacy, Reading & Written Language
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Literacy FoundationsFree preview
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Why Literacy Belongs to the SLP
Reading and writing are language in a second modality. Oral vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and narrative skill predict later reading comprehension, and reading experience in turn drives vocabulary growth. ASHA's 2001 position statement places prevention, identification, assessment, and intervention for reading and writing problems inside the SLP scope of practice. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) or a history of speech sound disorder carry elevated literacy risk.
The Simple View of Reading
Reading comprehension is the product of two capacities: Reading Comprehension = Decoding x Language Comprehension (Gough and Tunmer, 1986). If either factor is near zero, comprehension collapses.
| Profile | Decoding | Language comprehension | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Typical reader | Adequate | Adequate | None |
| Dyslexia | Weak | Adequate | Specific word reading difficulty |
| Poor comprehender | Adequate | Weak | Specific comprehension deficit, often with DLD |
| Mixed difficulty | Weak | Weak | Historically the "garden-variety" poor reader |
Scarborough's Reading Rope unpacks the two factors: word recognition strands (phonological awareness, decoding, sight recognition) become automatic, while language comprehension strands (background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning, literacy knowledge) become strategic.
High-Yield: A child who decodes accurately but cannot answer inferential questions has a language comprehension problem. Treat the language, and coordinate with the reading specialist on text-level strategies.
The rest of this outline 6
- Phonological Awareness Continuum
- Dyslexia: Definition and Markers
- Written Language Assessment
- Evidence-Based Intervention
- Common Traps
- Sources to Know
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