How Speech Therapy Can Boost Literacy Skills
If your child is struggling with reading, you may already be exploring reading intervention or tutoring. But did you know that speech therapy can also play a key role in building reading skills?
Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) don’t just help with pronunciation or speech sounds—we can help children strengthen the language foundations that support reading and writing. Language and literacy are deeply connected. When a child has difficulty understanding or using language, it often shows up in reading comprehension, spelling, and written expression too.
Here’s how speech therapy can complement reading instruction by targeting different parts of language that support literacy success.
Phonology: Building Awareness of Speech Sounds
How improving phonology helps with reading:
- Strengthens phonological awareness skills like recognizing and playing with sounds in words
- Improves letter-sound correspondence (matching written letters to spoken sounds)
- Leads to stronger word recognition and decoding skills
Children who can hear and manipulate sounds in words (for example, knowing that cat and bat rhyme) have a much easier time learning to read.
Morphology: Understanding Word Structure
How morphology instruction supports reading and writing:
- Helps children understand that adding -s makes a word plural or possessive
- Teaches that -ed means a word is in the past tense
- Builds awareness of prefixes and suffixes, which improves spelling and vocabulary
- Supports listening comprehension and reading comprehension by helping kids figure out what unfamiliar words mean
When children understand how words are built, they become more confident and independent readers.
Syntax: Making Sense of Sentences
How targeting syntax supports literacy:
- Improves understanding of sentence structure—simple, compound, and complex sentences
- Strengthens listening comprehension and reading comprehension
- Enhances writing skills, since children learn how to organize and connect their ideas clearly
Better sentence understanding helps kids follow stories, directions, and informational texts.
Semantics: Growing Vocabulary and Word Meaning
How improving semantic skills impacts reading:
- Expands receptive and expressive vocabulary
- Improves listening and reading comprehension
- Strengthens word recognition and written expression
A rich vocabulary helps children not only understand what they read but also express their own ideas more clearly.
Pragmatics: Using Language for Understanding and Connection
How working on pragmatic language helps with comprehension:
- Builds understanding of a character’s actions, emotions, and intentions in stories
- Strengthens the ability to make inferences and predictions while reading
- Improves overall reading comprehension through deeper engagement with text
Pragmatic language skills help children “read between the lines,” which is essential for higher-level comprehension.
The Takeaway
Reading involves more than recognizing words on a page—it’s about understanding language. That’s why speech therapy and reading intervention go hand in hand
SLPs target the building blocks of language that make reading possible. Together with reading specialists, speech therapists can help children develop the communication and literacy skills they need to thrive at school and beyond.
We love helping families discover how to make it fun and meaningful! If you’re curious about how speech therapy can support your child’s language and literacy development, our award-winning team at Child & Family Development, recently voted Charlotte’s Best Speech Therapy (Gold), would love to connect. Schedule a free consultation with one of our pediatric speech therapists using our easy self-scheduling tool. We can’t wait to meet you and your reader-in-training!
