DLD, Dyslexia, and Supporting Language to Improve Literacy

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Strong literacy skills depend on strong language skills. Although most children acquire spoken language effortlessly, language problems are often difficult to detect. Indeed, studies indicate that most of students with developmental language disorder (DLD) are not identified and do not receive language support. Although they are different disorders, DLD frequently co-occurs with dyslexia; it is also associated with reading comprehension problems even in students with fluent decoding skills. This talk will describe the longitudinal relations between spoken language and literacy development and disorders and explain how and why language difficulties are so commonly missed. Using examples from recent studies, I will discuss the rationale for directly assessing students’ sentence-level language skills to improve the identification of students who need support and directly teaching sentence-level language skills to promote stronger reading comprehension and writing for all.