Dear Parents: Ask the Right Questions to Get the Right Services

As a parent, ensuring your child receives the right interventions for their reading or writing deficits is crucial. However, many narrowly focused reading and spelling programs emphasize isolated aspects of reading and writing. While these approaches can limitedly help with specific skills, they often fail to address the broader, critical contributions of oral language and pragmatics to reading and writing. Without these foundational elements, progress in reading fluency, reading comprehension, written expression, and overall academic success will be limited.

The Risks of Using Narrowly Focused Approaches

Popular structured literacy approaches like OG or Wilson are highly regarded for children with dyslexia or decoding challenges. However, their focus is primarily on select aspects of reading. They do not comprehensively address:

1. Oral Language Skills: Vocabulary knowledge, sentence structure, and narrative abilities form the backbone of reading comprehension and writing. A child who can decode well but lacks these skills will struggle to extract meaning from text or express ideas clearly.
2. Pragmatic Language: Skills such as perspective-taking, understanding context, and making inferences are essential for reading comprehension and written expression. These are often overlooked in programs that center solely on decoding and reading fluency.
3. Higher-Level Comprehension: Programs emphasizing decoding and spelling often fail to address skills like summarizing, synthesizing, and analyzing text—critical for academic success.

Unfortunately, incorrect or incomplete therapies can lead to more than just slow progress:

• Therapy Fatigue: Children may grow resistant to evidence-based interventions when they fail to yield meaningful improvements.
• Time and Money Wasted: Families invest in programs that do not address their child’s underlying needs.
• Missed Opportunities: By the time effective therapy is identified, too much money may be spent and the child may resist participation, further delaying progress.

Why Oral Language and Pragmatics Matter

Even if parents believe their child does not have oral language deficits, it is essential to thoroughly evaluate these areas to ensure that deficits are not missed. Children often present with subtle language weaknesses that significantly impact reading and writing which if undetected will affect treatment outcomes. For instance:

• Difficulty understanding complex sentences can hinder reading comprehension.
• Limited literate vocabulary knowledge will restrict both reading comprehension and written expression.
• Poor narrative and discourse skills will impair the ability to retell stories, summarize text, and write essays.
• Challenges with pragmatic language will prevent understanding of implied meanings, leading to poor reading comprehension.

Without addressing these deficits, children may never achieve their full potential, no matter how rigorous the decoding, reading fluency, reading comprehension, spelling, or written instruction is.

Select Questions to Ask Providers

When looking for potential providers it’s important to ask these critical questions:

1. How do you assess oral language skills, including metalinguistics, syntax, and narrative abilities to ensure there are no hidden deficits? What assessments do you use?
2. What role do pragmatic language skills play in reading and writing development, and how do you evaluate them?
3. Do you assess and address higher-level comprehension skills, such as inferencing and summarizing?
4. How do you integrate oral language development with decoding and phonics instruction?
5. What methods do you use to support reading comprehension and written expression beyond phonics?
6. Can you explain how your approach will help my child develop the skills needed for decoding, spelling, and understanding of complex text as well as writing?
7. How do you track therapy progress and modify therapy goals to ensure ongoing intervention progress or how do you know the therapy is working?

The Bottom Line

As a parent, it is very overwhelming to navigate the myriad of service options available. However, taking the time to understand the full picture of your child’s needs and asking the right questions can save your family time, money, and frustration. Comprehensive assessments and therapies that integrate oral language, pragmatics reading, spelling, and writing will give your child the tools they need to succeed—socially, academically, and vocationally.

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