All Rights Reserved Speech and language disorders and literacy Children with developmental phonological disorders have difficulty learning and organising all the sounds needed for clear speech, reading and spelling. Many of these children are slow to acquire the pre-literacy skills that are a necessary foundation for learning to read fluently, understand what they have read, and spell. This is because they have poor phonological awareness in particular, and poor metalinguistic skills generally. Phonological awareness is the ability to recognise and manipulate the sounds and syllables used to compose words.
Metalinguistic ability is the capacity to think about and talk about language.
Some of the activities can be done at home, one to one with an adult, or as games the whole family may be able to participate in. The materials required to implement the activities include children's picture and story books, and picture cards representing speech sounds and minimally contrasted word pairs. Examples of word pairs that might be used are listed at the end of this article. Paste a picture of each of the words onto a card, and print the word, in lower case, under the picture. Children often enjoy becoming involved in making home-made card games such as these.