Many years ago an incidental observation of a struggling child reader provided me an opportunity to observe how a limited vocabulary has an impact on literacy skills.
Having worked with a child experiencing literacy difficulties for 30 hours of one-to-one intervention using the Phonology with Reading Programme, I noted that the child often struggled with vocabulary. In other words, in addition to her expected problems with phoneme weaknesses and letter knowledge, she also showed weaknesses in oral language (e.g. vocabulary).
She would attempt to give lots of information about an object in order to describe it but could not include key words. For example, when saying what a banana was she said "white, skin is yellow". She seemed unable to say "a fruit".
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