Literacy is a basic demand of modern civilization. Educational systems promote reading and writing as a primary requirement of schooling. In children with Νeurodevelopmental Disorders, language development is very often affected, and obstacles emerge that are also strongly reflected in writing and reading skills. The difficulties to develop such skills are identified already from the first years of schooling, they are of great concern to the educational community and the school context is called upon to either manage and support these students or implement appropriate interventions to deal with these difficulties. Especially, in early school years but also later, when students develop metacognitive strategies, teaching plays a crucial role in literacy. The ways of pedagogical management and intervention in children with neurodevelopmental disorders and more specifically with Special Learning Disorders that focus on reading and writing skills are a valuable tool for teachers. This chapter will highlight where the various interventions in the school context should be aimed and how important is the role of Executive Functions.
TopIntroduction
Reading and writing are primary skills that children are asked to develop in the school context. They are the beginnings of literacy and are prerequisites for cognitive development and learning during schooling. Yet children with various difficulties in reading and writing into different diagnostic profile is still a major challenge. SLDs related to reading comprehension and written expression difficulties represent a spectrum of disorders, each occurring in approximately 5% to 15% of the school-age population (Grigorenko et al., 2020), while SLDs in general affect 3% to 10% of population (Francés et al., 2022), with the male gender appearing to be more affected (e.g., in developmental dyslexia) (Yang et al., 2022). A significant portion of these readers perform five or more grade levels below their peers in reading (Gartland & Strosnider, 2018). Furthermore, children with persistent language difficulties during the early school years are more likely to develop reading problems, as early oral language difficulties are strong predictors of later reading comprehension difficulties (Hulme & Snowling, 2016).
According to DSM-5 language -related neurodevelopmental disorders, among others that influence language, are Communication Disorders (Language Disorder; Speech Sound Disorder; Childhood-Onset Fluency Disorder /Stuttering; Social /Pragmatic Communication Disorder) and Specific Learning Disorders (Impairment in reading; Impairment in written expression) (APA, 2013;2022). This chapter will focus on Specific Learning Disorders and especially on impairments in reading and writing which are directly related to the school context and affect children’s academic performance.
Prior (2022, p.4,5) recently defines dyslexia (reading disability), following definition of dyslexia promulgated by the World Federation of Neurology, as ‘a medically oriented term which simply means abnormal reading. a disorder manifested by difficulty in learning to read despite conventional instruction, adequate intelligence, and socio- cultural opportunity. It is dependent on fundamental cognitive disabilities which are frequently of constitutional origin’.
In recent research (Bridges & Kelley, 2023) teachers reported that more than half of the students on their caseload had reading and writing difficulties. Over time, many school-age children with language difficulties are reported to struggle with text comprehension and text writing, even with adequate decoding skills (Hall-Mills & Marante, 2023; McMaster et al., 2014; Zerva, 2023). A lot of students often struggle with school failure, as they lack early detection of learning difficulties or effective intervention (Kougioumtzis et al., 2021). One third of children who showed poor oral language at the age of 7, maintained several language difficulties in time from school entry to late school years (Nation, 2019). Given that for many years language assessment has had deficits, as “knowledge-based” measures such as vocabulary tests increase cultural and socioeconomic differences among children, while “processing” measures that vary in difficulty levels control for material to be processed (e.g., repetition of nonsense words), providing a culturally unbiased assessment of language ability (Bishop & Norbury, 2008, p. 792), it is now clearer that school underachievement is estimated basically by teachers and therefore the school context is a very important factor in recognizing and managing learning difficulties.
Researchers are constantly on the lookout for ways to improve the literacy of children with specific learning disorders (Language and Reading Research Consortium, 2015), such as the recent research of Gillam et al. (2023) whose intervention was found particularly beneficial in the written narrative of students with language difficulties, the recent research by Hall-Mills & Marante (2023) whose intervention increased performance of reading comprehension of students with a history of SLD or the intervention program conducted by Calvani et al. (2022) which significantly improved reading and writing skills in children at risk for developing related difficulties.