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Reading skills

2017-04-12
MANY students are identified as having learning difficulties when it comes to reading. These may be related to issues with cognitive function, the causes of which may be biological or environmental and may translate into visual, phonological, language and/or memory deficits.

At the cognitive level, many prerequisite skills are likely to be influenced by environmental factors such as whether or not a child attends preschool; has access to a range of written, oral and visual learning materials at home; has opportunities to practice speaking and reading; and has parental encouragement.

It is widely accepted that reading is a language-based skill. Word recognitiondepends on phonological and lexical knowledge, while comprehension of larger text discourse requires syntactic, morphemic, semantic and whole text structural knowledge. As a consequence, children who have difficulties in one or more of these functions will have considerable difñcultyinreading.

It has been found that skilled readers outperform less-skilled readers on measures related to working memory, processingspeed and updating information. Reading comprehension delays are also associated with problems in higher order skills, such as prediction and summarising, using background knowledge, and forming mental imagery.

Many of the processes involved in comprehension, such as integration and inference, anaphoricprocessing,use of context cues, monitoring comprehension, and structuring of narratives, are dependent on the storage and organisation of information in memory. Children with poor comprehension skills sometimes exhibit poor verbal short-term memory, while others perform well on simple memory tasks. One of the most essential reading comprehension skills is the ability to use selective and focused attention.

Sarfaraz Laghari Dadu