According to current research, reading difficulties that are not the result of limited intelligence or lack of educational opportunity are most often caused by a deficit in phonological processing.
The languages of the world are most similar in their basic principles of phrase structure, including the subject-predicate structure of sentences.
Identifying the initial sound in a word (e.g., /b/ in bed) is typically the easiest phonemic awareness skill for children to acquire.
Oral rhyming activities are most likely to promote phonemic awareness by helping a child learn to attend to the sounds shared by words in the same word family. Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) in words, and it is a critical skill for learning to read and write.
An extensive oral vocabulary is most likely to contribute to a reader's decoding skills by helping the reader recognize a word after sounding it out.
Knowing a language that is historically related to English (e.g., German, French, Spanish) can facilitate an individual's acquisition of English as a second language because many words and roots are likely to have similar spellings and meanings in English and in the individual's first language.
