Language and Literacy

Spoken Language competence is the basis of written language competence. Weakness in the former will affect the development of the latter and ultimately affect the ability to attend, follow directions and ultimately the skills of reading and writing and ultimately academic success. CLK Speech can weave language skills along with cognitive/thinking skills to strengthen literacy and the likelihood of that academic success.

The question to a preschooler should NOT be, “How do you spell cat?” Rather, “What rhymes with cat?” Or, “What sound does the word ‘cat’ start (or end) with?”, and other skills that require breaking down and building up and analyzing the sounds in spoken words. This is the first step toward phonics learning, and “decoding” (sounding out) written words.

After learning to sound out the words, the child needs to understand and link together the meaning of the words and ideas conveyed in sentences, paragraphs, and stories in which they are contained.

A child needs to understand the structure of stories and the telling of stories that comply with those structures in a coherent sequential manner.

When putting pencil to paper when writing, a child needs to hold onto their ideas long enough to put them down on the paper — and needs to do so with correct grammatical structure, spelling, punctuation, and organization of ideas — from the sentence level to paragraphs to essays and longer expository writings.

Finding the main idea, supporting details, what belongs and what doesn’t, along with the ability to infer and draw conclusions, seeing the connection between cause and effect, understanding sayings and expressions, humor, and human behavior as it relates to the motivations of literary characters, become increasingly essential as the child progresses through middle school, high school, and college.