Skill Level Learning with Late Bloomers

What is the primary skill poor early readers are lacking?

Phonemic awareness was the critical skill that seemed to be lacking in the poor early readers.  “Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are made up of sounds which can be assembled in different ways to make different words” (Time4Learning).  Many children were having trouble just sounding out words as they tried to read them in texts.  As the article mentions, researchers believed that the problem stemmed from decoding.  They believed that the children did not understand the sounds that letters could make when they were arranged differently to make certain words.  As we have all seen in field studies, children do struggle with decoding what sound a letter makes in certain words.  The children from this study were tested in the first grade and did not reach the “ceiling” of test scores until they reached the third grade.  This would mean that these children were already two years behind their peers that were not struggling in the first place.