Minimizing Reading Failure Through Early Identification of At-risk Reading Disability Children

Abstract

This article, which is prepared to describe the theoretical foundations and explain the model of our research on Minimizing Reading Failure Through Early Identification of At-risk Reading Disability Children, aims to explore the theoretical model of proximal causes of reading acquistion among children. After presenting the main different models prepared by the international scientists with regard to the explanation of proximal causes of reading acquistion, we have tried to describe our own model in this concern. Our model is based on the idea that meta-linguistic abilities (and specifically, phonological awareness) is the basis for reading and writing acquistion and that to minimize reading failures among at-risk disability children we should try to: 1) have early identification of children's language background; 2) recognize their meta-linguistic abilities of phonological decoding, phonological awareness, syntactic awareness, and semantic awarenss; and 3) improve our methods of teaching reading and writing. This will help the students not only to read correctly and fast but also to comprehend what they read. We have also tried to show in this article that teaching reading requires not only the recognition of the proximal causes of reading acquisition but also needs our attempt for the transition of natural phonology in childrens speech into the writing language by improving their phonological awareness in learning reading.