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Reading and Writing with Confidence; a Blog Post by Sarah Etherington

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Why is my child struggling to read and write?

More and more parents in Ontario are worried about their children’s literacy, or their ability to read and write. Not only are these skills the backbone for children’s academic success, but they are also indispensable for having well-rounded social lives, fulfilling jobs and careers, and self-confidence as well. Unfortunately, the reality is that many students in Ontario have been struggling to learn how to read and write.

Note. From Education Quality and Accountability Office. (2024). Provincial results, 2023-2024. King’s Printer for Ontario. https://www.eqao.com/results/.
Note. From Education Quality and Accountability Office. (2024). Provincial results, 2023-2024. King’s Printer for Ontario. https://www.eqao.com/results/.

According to the Education Quality and Accountability Office’s (2024) standardized test results, 71% of grade 3 students and 82% of grade 6 students in Ontario are meeting the provincial standards for reading, while 64% and 80% are meeting the standards for writing. Despite the positive growth and the narrowing gap between reading and writing skills seen in grade 6 students in Ontario, there still remains 20%, or one in every five students, who struggle to read and write effectively on a daily basis. Regrettably, the percentages in Grand-Erie District School Board are about 10% lower than the province’s across the board: only 62% of grade 3 students are meeting reading standards and 54% meeting writing standards, which means that nearly half of grade 3 students are struggling to learn to write.



This does not need to be the case. Research suggests that 95% of students, all but those with severe learning disabilities, can be successful readers (Moats, 2020, p. 4-5), and much of the gap seen in Ontario literacy rates are not attributable to children’s abilities but rather their opportunities to learn. In fact, the public inquiry conducted by the Ontario Human Rights Commission (2022) alleges that Ontario has failed to provide students with adequate reading instruction, which makes them vulnerable to dealing with life-long difficulties (p. 2). While students with dyslexia have been particularly at risk (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2022, p. 9), so have many other students in our public education system. An inability to read is a barrier to academic success and also erodes students’ confidence in themselves. Despite the fact that a reading disability has no connection to intelligence, students who cannot read well sadly report that they feel ‘stupid’ (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2022, p. 10). In fact, these types of reading disabilities are preventable if students are provided with the right instruction (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2022, p. 9).


What does the right instruction look like?

The Right to Read report suggests that many students have fallen behind in reading because classroom instruction has been using reading strategies such as three-cueing and the balanced literacy approach (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2022, p. 42). Three-cueing is a way of directing students’ attention to using cues like pictures, context clues like neighbouring words, and their knowledge of a subject to guess what a word says while balanced literacy is an approach whereby teachers model and guide students’ reading, slowly removing these supports to allow students to ultimately read on their own (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2022, p. 21). While it is true that practically all children who are exposed to spoken or signed languages will naturally learn how to speak or sign (Hoff, 2008, p. 355), there is not enough evidence to suggest that all children can effectively learn how to read and write from a balanced approach to instruction. Instead, the Right to Read report advocates for children to be taught using a structured literacy approach in that they need to be taught directly, explicitly, and systematically (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2022, p. 21). The good news is that Ontario’s updated curriculum is now aligned with this science-based and evidence-based structured literacy approach (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2023).


Not only is how they are taught important, but also what they are taught matters. In 1997, the National Reading Panel in the U.S. conducted a three-year study of all the available research on how children learn to read, and they concluded that children require explicit and systematic instruction to learn the following key skills: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, guided oral reading, vocabulary, and reading comprehension strategies (Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2019). First, phonemic awareness is the knowledge that a word is composed of separate sounds, like the word dog has three sounds in it. Phonics is the understanding that these separate sounds can be represented by letters in writing. Fluency refers to the ability to automatically recognize words. Guided oral reading occurs when experienced readers give feedback to kids as they are practicing reading out loud. Vocabulary knowledge means that children can attach the correct meanings to words. Finally, using strategies like summarizing can help students to improve their overall reading comprehension.


According to the Simple View of reading, reading comprehension occurs when a reader recognizes a word and attaches meaning to that word (Moats, 2020, p. 5). However, there are many smaller components that go into these two processes, and it turns out that the act of reading is far from being simple at all. The Scarborough’s Reading Rope infographic (Really Great Reading, 2024) provides a useful visual for understanding how being a skilled reader requires someone to simultaneously weave together many distinct abilities: 


Finally, in addition to the how and the what of reading instruction, when children are taught also contributes to successful reading outcomes. During the emergent literacy stage, young children become familiar with books, initially by putting them in their mouths, then learning to hold them and turn pages, and finally by pretending to read as they begin to understand what books are for (Hoff, 2008, p. 359). Importantly, between the ages of four to seven, there is a critical window of opportunity wherein children who become successful readers are primed to read both for learning and for enjoyment, while those who struggle find themselves at a disadvantage (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2003, p. 7). These are the ages when children are learning to put together the skills depicted in Scarborough’s Reading Rope, slowly at first, but with increasing speed and strategy. As children grow into adolescence and young adults, they continue to hone these skills, becoming more fluent and skilled readers of increasingly difficult texts. For these reasons, receiving quality instruction and accessing early interventions for those who are struggling is vitally important during the first few years of school (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2022, p. 37; Ontario Ministry of Education, 2003, p. 8) and remains important for those who continue to struggle.


How can a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) help my child?

SLPs provide both speech and language therapies which directly or indirectly complement the development of literacy skills in children, so SLPs are well-positioned to play an important role in supporting the growth of literacy, especially in children with speech- or language-related difficulties.

During the preschool years, as children are building their oral language skills and learning to speak, they are laying the foundation for their reading and writing abilities. In the same way, children with speech or language impairments are likely to experience issues when learning literacy skills (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 2024). SLPs provide screenings and assessments along with therapies to target these issues and support children’s language development. Part of this involves working with speech sounds. Using articulation therapies, SLPs will target children’s ability to produce speech sounds they find difficult, thereby building children’s phonological awareness.

As can be seen in Scarborough’s Reading Rope, phonological awareness includes knowledge of words, syllables and phonemes, those individual speech sounds. SLPs provide training in how to manipulate spoken words through activities like rhyming (dog, log, frog), alliteration (Danny’s dog dug in the dirt), and separating sentences into words and words into syllables (syl/la/bles). As children play with words in these ways, they also grow their phonemic awareness about the individual sounds within words. In fact, there is ample evidence to support the idea that phonological awareness in these early years is the most significant predictor of reading skills and that training in phonology has a positive effect on reading ability (Hoff, 2008, p. 365).


Certainly, these abilities to manipulate words and sounds have an impact on the skills children use when they are reading and writing, skills called blending and segmenting, which children must be directly, explicitly, and systematically taught (Hussey & Virtue, n.d.). In order to read a word successfully, a child needs to see the printed word dog, recognize the three letters and connect those letters to their sounds: d, o, and g. However, until those three separate sounds are connected, they have no meaning. The child must be able to blend the sounds together into the word dog and then connect that word to their idea of a dog. The more practice children are given with this skill allows them to blend more quickly and automatically, supporting their reading development.

When writing, children reverse the above process. They think of a word, segment the word into its separate sounds, and then map those sounds onto letters that represent them. This is where knowledge of phonics and spelling, which again children must be directly, explicitly, and systematically taught, are applied (Moats, 2005/06). For example, to spell the word fish, a child must learn that the letters sh together represent a different sound than when they see those letters separately, like in has. Again, the more practice a child has with segmenting and mapping sounds, the faster and easier it is for them to write.

As children develop beyond the level of blending and segmenting, SLPs can support children’s application of more complex language skills, such as recognizing common patterns of letters or syllables and identifying different parts of words and sentences (Fallon and Katz, 2020, p. 337). For example, when a child encounters longer words like in the sentence The dog whimpered unhappily, the -ed ending will signal that whimpered is something that the dog did. The child may recognize that the prefix un means not, happy is the root word, and ly describes the way the dog whimpered. Moreover, understanding the word unhappily can help to support the child’s recognition that whimpered means cried. These types of skills support reading and vocabulary growth, problem-solving, and writing and spelling (Fallon and Katz, 2020, p. 338-339). In these ways, beyond the level of word recognition in reading, SLPs also support language comprehension development, the second main ingredient in Scarborough’s Reading Rope.

SLPs apply evidence-based speech and language therapies that align with the practices of structured literacy to help children become skilled readers. Using direct, explicit, and structured approaches, they promote phonological awareness skills and the complex vocabulary development necessary to empower children to read and write with confidence. As the Right to Read report acknowledges, “with evidence-based reading instruction, early identification, and early evidence-based reading intervention,… a reading disability can be prevented for almost all students” (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2022, p. 9). Reading is not a privilege but rather a right, and all children have the right to a better future.

 **References and Additional Resources Available:



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