skilled reading

The skilled reader completes multiple, concurrent tasks in order to read the words in front of him, as well as comprehend the explicit and implicit meaning of those words. When students come to me for literacy therapy, I assess whether their need lies in the area of word recognition or language comprehension - often it is a mixture of both. 

In order to recognise and read words students must have phonological awareness (the ability to discern words, syllables, and phonemes), decoding skills (an understanding of the systematic and predictable relationships between letters and sounds, as well as an orthographic map of those sounds and symbols and how they connect), and a bank of familiar words that they can recognise by sight because they have been stored in the long term memory filing system in a retrievable and stable form. 

In order to comprehend written language students need background knowledge of facts and concepts covered in that text, a vocabulary bank that is developed enough in breadth and precision to draw upon for making meaning, stable language structures for syntax and semantics, verbal reasoning skills to understand inference, metaphors and other figurative language, and knowledge of language conventions, print concepts and genre. 

All of this places a huge demand on working memory - one of our executive functions. For children with working memory deficits, this is a practically insurmountable task unless broken down and scaffolded with the intent of bringing it all back together at some point.