Communication Matters

Reading books with your preschooler is one of the best ways to increase language and pre-literacy skills.  Language skills include listening (comprehending or understanding of concepts) and speaking (expressing thoughts, ideas, concepts, and feelings). Pre-literacy skills are those behaviors associated with successful reading development and include strong vocabulary and narrative skills, interest in books, print awareness, and phonological awareness. Some phonological awareness tasks for a preschool-aged child are rhyming, segmenting and blending syllables into words, and identifying beginning and ending sounds in words.

Tags: Speech, Language, Communication, Learning

Tags: Language, Communication, Teens, Support, Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Hearing Loss, American Sign Language, Interpreting, ASL Interpreter, ASL, Learning

Children ages 3-5 are considered to be preschool-age. During this time, it is important to lay a strong foundation of language and literacy skills. Early exposure to a variety of language concepts and literacy themes can prepare your child for success in preschool and ensure they have adequate time to master skills that will help them to thrive in kindergarten.

Tags: Speech, Communication, reading, literacy, Learning

Social skills are the ways we use our language skills in social situations. Social communication is important in developing effective interpersonal skills and is critical to various aspects of our daily life. Social skills are important in childhood and adulthood. What is the relationship between social skills and speech-language skills/disorders?

Tags: Speech, Language, Communication, Learning, Voice

Assessment

Tags: Speech, Language, Communication, Learning, Voice

Language is the basis for all learning. Children first learn to communicate through eye contact, crying, vocalizing and gesturing. As they grow, they learn the language around them. Children then learn about their world through language by talking, playing and reading; parents and teachers use various forms of language to help children learn. Later, children learn about language as they grow older.

Tags: Speech, Language, Communication, Hearing, Learning, Voice

Auditory processing is basically how hearing works between the ear and the brain. It consists of a specific set of skills that most of us perform without any difficulty – or awareness. These include:

Tags: Audiology, Hearing, Learning

The Wilson Reading System (WRS) is a multi-sensory, research-based reading and writing program. It is a complete curriculum for teaching decoding (sounding out words) and encoding (spelling), beginning with phoneme segmentation. WRS directly teaches the structure of words in the English language so that students master the coding system for reading and spelling. Unlike other programs that overwhelm the student with rules, the language system of English is presented in a systematic and cumulative manner so that it is manageable. It provides an organized, sequential system with extensive controlled text to help teachers implement a multi-sensory structured language program.

Tags: reading, literacy, Wilson Reading Program, Learning

The National Education Association (NEA) Read Across America Day is an annual reading motivation and awareness program that calls for every child in every community to celebrate reading on March 2, the birthday of beloved children's author Dr. Seuss.

Tags: Speech, Language, Communication, reading, literacy, Wilson Reading Program, Learning

If your child has difficulty with any of the listed signs and symptoms, a language learning evaluation conducted by a speech-language pathologist SLP) is recommended.

• Reads slowly and painfully
• Shows wide disparity between listening comprehension and reading comprehension of some text; that is, they understand if someone tells them

Tags: Speech, Language, Communication, reading, literacy, Learning