Morphological Use as an Indicator of Reading Disability Essays

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article described reading difficulties aligned to the Simple View of Reading (as cited in Gough & Tunmer, 1986). They went into depth about three types of poor readers: (a) dyslexia- those with poor decoding, (b) language comprehension- poor reading comprehension, and (c) listening comprehension- impairments in both decoding and language comprehension. Further, they broke down how each reading difficulty is believed to manifest, is measured, and what it specifically affects.

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

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

When phonological awareness is worked on skills of attention, perception and visual amplitude are developed that allow to acquire greater fluency for reading.

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

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.

Reading is associated with new vibrancy in the left-hemisphere of the brain (Turkeltaub, Gareau, Flowers, Zeffiro, & Eden, 2003). When this part of the brain records a rise in activity and the right inferotemporal records a reduction in doings, then a person increases his phonological skills (Turkeltaub, et al., 2003; Raschlea, Zuk, & Gaab, 2012). This enhances the learning capability of a person and this can be taken to mean that with a reduction in the development of the phonological skills, then a person is likely to develop learning difficulties (Ivry & Justus, 2001). As such, the authors are in support of the phonological theory with regard to dyslexia. In addition, the study has shown that reduced ability to differentiate between phonetics can lead to learning difficulties.

The study included 35 children (20 girls and 15 boys) between the ages of 12 years, 1 month and 14 years, 9 months who were assigned to the treatment group. Additionally, 33 children (18 girls and 15 boys) between the ages of 11 years, 11 months and 14 years, 1 month were assigned to the no treatment control group. All participants were in the 7th grade and English was not their dominant language. The method used for this study consisted of teaching the participants in the treatment group phonological awareness and literacy skills. This included phoneme segmentation, manipulation, and blending tasks. When the participants were proficient with these tasks, they were taught to apply the skills to actual reading and spelling activities. Both the Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test (LAC) and the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test (WRMT) were administered to participants in both groups before and after treatment. The performance on posttest measures for the treatment group was compared to performance of the no treatment group. The results of this study reveal that participants who participated in the phonological based treatment outperformed the group who received no treatment. Therefore, direct instruction in phonological awareness improved the skills of the 7th graders in the treatment group. The results of this study suggest that direct and explicit instruction in

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.

In brief, the methodology consisted of twenty two participants with dyslexia, and twenty two normally developing readers who were enlisted from 10 upper secondary schools in Hordaland County. With these participants In the Dyslexia group, 11 were men and 11 were women. For the normal readers, 14 were men, and 8 were women (Furnes & Normal, 2015). All participants with dyslexia were diagnosed during elementary or secondary grade school. Numerous materials were used to assess and measure the data acquired in this study. Nonverbal ability was measured using the

Methodology: The participants in this study consisted of monolinguistic and ESL children, defined as speaking any language other than English at home. These students hail from 30 different schools in a local school district of British Columbia, Canada. A total of 674 seventh grade students were compared in word reading, reading comprehension, working memory, phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and morphological awareness, where 572 were monolinguistic and 102 were ESL coming from a wide range of language backgrounds. They were assessed with the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test - Revised and the Test of Word Reading Efficiency for the word reading measure; students were instructed to read a list of words in the WRMT-R and given 45 seconds to complete the same task from the Sight Word Efficiency and Phonemic Decoding Efficiency subtests in TOWRE. Assessment terminated after 10 errors. In the reading comprehension measure, there were two different assessments in place: the Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test and the Planet Filk and Greb test.