Morphological Use as an Indicator of Reading Disability Essays

Phonological awareness is being able to distinguish the assembly of isolated sounds that make up words and experiment with adjusting the distinct sounds known as Phonemes to form new words (Emmit, Hornsby & Wilson, 2013). Elements of phonological awareness include practice with separating, manipulating and grouping together sounds of words, in addition to exploring words and sounds in an enjoyable way using rhymes (Matheson, 2005). Phonological awareness provides innovative processes for a broader vocabulary and the ability to sound out new words (University of Oregon, 2009). The decoding process that occurs allows readers the ability to then concentrate on the meaning of what they read and improve their reading development (Reid Lyon, 1998). When teaching phonological awareness to children, teachers should work in small groups that explore only a couple of concepts at a time for instance how the mouth moves when saying a variety of isolated sounds in comparison to these phoneme sounds blended to assemble a word (Learning Point Associates, 2004). In conjunction with the familiarity of phonemes and words in phonological awareness, it is imperative to integrate this fundamental feature of reading development with understanding graphemes, and the link to letters in print to their phonemes sounds with phonics (Fellows & Oatley,

Dyslexia is a specific reading disorder of neurobiological origin. Of the language based learning disabilities, dyslexia is the most common. It is estimated that 1 in 5 school-aged children have a reading disability and of those children, 60% to80% have dyslexia (Dyslexia Center of Utah, 2016). Dyslexia is highly hereditary but can occur without any known family history. Early signs of dyslexia can be overlooked until the child enters school, unless there’s a family history in which case the child might be identified sooner. Some early signs are speech delay, difficulty with word retrieval and difficulty acquiring new vocabulary. They may also demonstrate difficulty remembering how to pronounce words correctly (International Dyslexia Association, 2016). Once the child begins school, the signs will become more apparent. Unlike their peers, in the early pre-literacy and early stages of reading, children with dyslexia may exhibit difficulty learning the alphabet and acquiring the alphabetic principle. Mastery of the alphabetic principle is what allows the reader to decode novel words. Individuals with dyslexia have difficulty with phonological processing, a necessary building block for the development of reading proficiency and consequently writing as it affects the ability to spell. Other indicators are difficulty with working memory and poor results in rapid automatized naming tasks. They may exhibit age appropriate spoken language and listening comprehension skills but

Phonemic awareness is a vital role in literacy instruction. Many schools and districts adopt a commercially published basal reading program and it becomes the cornerstone of their instruction ( (David Chard, n.d.). We also know that through investigation and research it has shown us that word-recognition instruction and instruction in oral language skills related to word recognition were inadequately represented. (David Chard, n.d.) The same researchers have found that the reading passages that students are reading didn’t relate to the words they were learning. In order for students to read at grade level or above a supplemental program should be implemented. I have found that at my school we are lacking a phonics program that will reach different students abilities and make them successful in reading. My goal for this paper is to show my district that using a supplemental phonics program aside from our basal phonics program will prove beneficial to strategic readers who fall below grade level.

With exceptional children, often many of them have auditory processing problems which means that something is preventing them from hearing the information they are receiving. Phonological processing is having the ability to detect the different phonemes or speech sounds as stated by Chard, D.J. & Dickson, S.V. (2018). This is a problem that many of the children in the exceptional children’s department have which makes teaching reading all the more

children learning to read and write, as well as being an important predictor of reading in

There are many components to building a student’s reading skill set. One skill that is introduced in preschool and developed through the primary grades is phonemic awareness. The term phonemic awareness is defined as the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes – individual sounds. The child becomes aware of how sounds are connected to words prior to reading. This awareness creates the understanding of how phonemes explains how the smallest part of sound creates a difference in sound to the meaning of a word. Therefore, the ability to dismantle words, and reassemble them, and then to alter the word into something different explains the concept behind phonemic awareness. It is the primary foundation in which other reading skill sets are according based.

We chose to assess phonological awareness because it is a crucial component in children’s development of writing, spelling, and reading skills (Paul & Norbury, 2012). Phonological awareness refers to an individual’s awareness of the sound structure or words; it can be characterized by words, syllables, onset/rime, phoneme manipulations, and the ability to rearrange these different levels into various patterns.

Snowling, M. J., & Hulme, C. (2012). Children’s reading impairments: From theory to practice. Japanese, Psychological Research, 55(2), 186-202. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-5884.2012.5541.x.

Ehri’s Phases of Word Reading and Spelling Development has four different phases that are used to describe the progressive stages of a reader. The first phase is the Pre-alphabetic phase, in this phase there is no letter to sound consciousness only visual features of a word which the students use as a reminder of how to read the words. Phase two is the Partial Alphabetic. When readers are in this phase they use some of the letters in the word (mainly the first and the last letters) to attempt to pronounce the word. Phase three is the Full Alphabetic Phase. In this phase the readers are now able to use and understand the alphabetic connections in words. The readers are now able to map graphemes to phonemes of words that have been read to them

This paper is a review of two articles published by Paul Miller in the Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities. The first is entitled, “The role of phonology in the word decoding skills of poor readers: evidence from individuals with prelingual deafness or diagnosed dyslexia,” and was written in 2007. The second, written in 2010, is named, “Phonological, orthographic, and syntactic awareness and their relation to reading comprehension in prelingually deaf individuals: what can we learn from skilled readers?” At their heart, the articles attempt to address what explains good and poor readers in the deaf community, rejecting previous assumptions in the literature in this area. The studies are carefully designed, and attempt to address

To measure children’s phonological awareness, teachers should look at children’s ability with different skills. For example, a child with strong phonological awareness is able to understand and can use, alliteration, the concept of spoken word, rhyme, syllable blending and syllable segmenting. Children start to read by listening others, and then recognizing sound in words, sounding words out for themselves and recognizing familiar words, so it is important for children to learn the phonological awareness because it can help kids to become a successful reader.

Tyler is a 9 year old fourth grader whose independent reading level was assessed to be at the preprimer level. Initial assessments revealed that Tyler’s strengths include: using semantic and syntactic clues when reading words in context, and mastery of certain phonics elements including initial consonants, initial blends and digraphs, ending sounds, vowels, and phonograms. He demonstrated weaknesses in certain phonics applications such as blending, substitution, and vowel pronunciation, as well as comprehension and vocabulary.

Remediation, having the student practice phonemic awareness, actually makes changes in the brain and increases the activity in the necessary parts to develop reading skills (Reading Development and Challenges PowerPoint, May 28). Understanding what the students are struggling with, such as understanding that it is recognizing phonemes which plague students with dyslexia, is integral to being able to actually devise accommodations in the classroom and strategies to help them. Shaywitz (2003), for example, helped me understand that in the case of a student with dyslexia, it is not the knowledge which they lack, but rather the ability to decode the phonemes of the word. It is not a lack of intelligence, but rather a difficulty with

Within current research, it is acknowledged that phonological impairment may result in dyslexia. A study by Lobier, Zoubrinetzky, and Valdois (2012) suggests that while phonological impairment may be the root cause in some dyslexic patients, visual processing deficits may play a significant role in dyslexia, especially in patients without phonological difficulties. More specifically, the research aimed to support the hypothesis that the “underlying impairment responsible for the VA span deficit is visual, not verbal” (2012, p. 768). To support the hypothesis, the study was designed to compare the performance of typically-developing children and dyslexic children on visual attention span tasks with verbal and non-verbal stimuli. Non-verbal stimuli were included to demonstrate the absence of

Morphological awareness supports a variety of literacy skills, including word identification, reading fluency, reading comprehension, and spelling. “Increased morphological awareness enables children to analyze the internal structure of words and decode them more quickly and accurately ("Morphological awareness: Implications," 2013).” Aaron exhibited problems with his morphological awareness in various spots throughout the language sample. For example Aaron said “And she felled in the thing”, “And the lady sawed her”. In these two utterances Aaron has shown a failure to meet and use the correct past tense morphology. Through intervention the SLP can influence the use of and knowledge of phonology and morphology on word recognition and spelling, ultimately increasing one’s morphological awareness.