Why Is My Child Struggling?

          When working with an alphabetic language like English, one of the primary goals of reading instruction is to teach students the “alphabetic principle” or concept that written language is a code in which the sounds of spoken language are spelled with letters and groups of letters. As a part of this, we want to equip students with a strong base of phonics knowledge or understandings of how sounds from spoken language are spelled in print. With this knowledge in hand, students are able to “decode” written English or sound it out by working from left to right in any given piece, noting the letters and groups of letters in each word, pulling out the sounds that they spell and finally, blending those sounds together to read each word. When arriving at the word, “cat,” for example, we would want students to scan the word from left to right, note the letters, “c,” “a” and “t,” therein, pull out the /k/, /ă/ and /t/ sounds that those letters spell and finally, blend those sounds together to read the word.

          So when a child is struggling to read English, it is almost always because they lack sufficient phonics knowledge to decode grade-level text. And while there are a number of reasons why this comes into play, two of the more common include: (1) the child has a condition (e.g. dyslexia, a general learning disorder, etc.) that presents obstacles to acquiring phonics knowledge and/or (2) the child has been receiving non-evidence-based phonics instruction that works for some students but fails others. Now in terms of why your child may be struggling, I obviously cannot say with certainty without having a chance to meet them, give my initial assessment, etc. But for now, again, just note that in all likelihood, your child’s reading struggles fundamentally stem from a phonics knowledge deficit.