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Talking Things Through – Why Early Speech Skills Are Crucial For Developing Literacy

Mandy Grist explains how children’s developing speech sounds and phonological awareness paves the way towards later literacy…

Mandy Grist
by Mandy Grist
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Many parents and practitioners believe children only acquire skills for literacy once they can talk, but in fact some of those underlying skills begin to develop from birth – or even earlier.

Most babies start to tune into the sounds around them from 27 weeks gestation, and continue after birth to develop their ability to listen to environmental and speech sounds – both crucial prerequisites for literacy skills.

Children learn the sounds needed for speech and literacy by listening to people speaking around them. As they learn to talk, their sound system develops gradually. This of course means that they don’t use all the possible speech sounds straight away, as some are later to develop than others.

What to expect

As with all aspects of children’s development, there are milestones for speech sound development that we know each child should pass through.

Babies begin by playing with sounds, then start to babble. By about a year old, babies are using speech sounds to communicate with adults, and use babble strings such as ‘ba-ba’ and ‘go-go’.

At 18 to 24 months, children will start to use a limited number of sounds in their words – typically ‘p’, ‘b’, ‘t’, ‘d’, ‘m’ and ‘w’ – but will often miss the ends off words. Usually, they can be understood about half of the time.

At 2 to 3 years children will then start to use a wider range of speech sounds. However, it’s typical for them to make lots of substitutions in their speech – meaning that words like ‘tup’ instead of ‘cup’ are common.

Many children will also shorten longer words, such as ‘nana’ instead of ‘banana’. They may also have difficulty where lots of sounds happen together in a word. For example, they may say ‘pider’ instead of ‘spider’ and have problems pronouncing ‘sh’, ‘ch’, ‘th’ and ‘r’ sounds.

At 3 to 4 years children can still have difficulties with a small number of sounds, for example, ‘r’, ‘w’, ‘l’, ‘f’, ‘th’, ‘sh’, ‘ch’ and ‘z’. They may still make substitutions in their speech and use other sounds in their place. As a general rule, most children can be understood by people who know them most of the time when they are three and a half years old.

By the time children reach 4 to 5 years of age they will have mastered most sounds effectively. However, they may have residual difficulties with more complex words, such as ‘scribble’ or ‘elephant’.

Links to later development A strong predictor of literacy development is phonological awareness. This is made up of many speech sound-related skills, including recognition and production of rhyme; identification of number of syllables; sound-to-word matching; word-to-word matching; sound deletion; and sound segmentation. To acquire and develop these skills, children will draw on their own phonological (sound) systems.

As practitioners, we can support children by practising a range of skills that follow a continuum of complexity. For example, developing awareness of larger sound segments (words and syllables) is easier than developing awareness of smaller sound elements (phoneme recognition, onset and rime, initial sound in a word and final sound in a word).

You can help children to acquire these skills through using songs, rhymes, rhythmic activities and stories in the following way:

• Develop word awareness within the context of phrases or sentences – e.g. ‘Find all the instances of the word ‘mother’ in Are You my Mother?

• Develop syllable awareness by finding syllables in words – e.g. ‘Find ‘lock’ in ‘locket’ and ‘padlock’

• Count syllables – starting with one syllable vs two syllables – by clapping them out or adding a brick for each syllable

• Add another syllable to make a new word – e.g. ‘but’/‘button’

Once these skills have been introduced, you then can move on to supporting higher level skills:

• Recognising phonemes – can they hear the first sound or last sound in a word?

• Matching sounds and letters

• Identifying rhymes using repetitive books with rhyming patterns.

We know that some of the stronger predictors of literacy development are the phonological awareness skills that develop later in children, such as sound segmentation (breaking up words into individual sounds) and manipulation of sounds in words (e.g. changing ‘cot’ to ‘hot’).

Supporting children with these skills is essential. A better understanding of how speech sound development is acquired will enable us as practitioners to ensure that children have the underlying speech sound system that’s vital for reading.

Mandy Grist is a specialist speech and language therapist who has workd in schools and educational settings since 1996, and a communication adviser for I CAN; for more information, visit www.talkingpoint.org.uk, www.ican.org.uk or follow @icancharity

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