The Truth about Childhood Apraxia of Speech and Literacy

Spoken language and written language are intricately connected. 

While an SLP’s primary role is helping children with their speech and language development,  the skills you help your clients with also impact their ability to become successful readers and writers. 

This post looks at the connection between motor speech planning and literacy, highlights the literacy skills you should monitor with your clients, and shares key strategies and tools you can use to support your clients’ early literacy development. 

How are motor speech planning and literacy connected? 

Children develop the skills they will eventually use to read long before they ever open a book and begin decoding words. 

There are specific skills SLPs focus on that build early literacy, including:

• Vocabulary
• Grammar and sentence structure
• Narrative skills
• Listening comprehension
• Inferencing
• Phonological awareness

Things like phonological awareness, being able to break words down into syllables and phonemes, may feel like it’s the opposite of what we do in apraxia therapy. 

Apraxia therapy targets the blending of sounds and syllables and phonological awareness is focused on separating the same sounds and syllables, they both impact a child’s ability to read and communicate. 

You can work on both skills by having children break words apart and then blend them together again. 

When do literacy challenges show up? 

You don’t have to wait until children are old enough to read to identify potential literacy challenges. 

Before a child learns to read, you may notice things like: 

• Limited vocabulary
• Difficulty understanding or following directions
• Trouble learning nursery rhymes
• Poor phonological awareness (rhyming, identifying beginning sounds, clapping syllables)
• Persistent speech sound errors
• Difficulty learning letter names or letter sounds
• Trouble telling simple stories

These signs aren’t literacy problems yet. But they are potential risk factors for reading challenges later on. 

Being aware of these potential risks and working on them as early as possible can help children improve their communication and avoid or mitigate later literacy issues. 

How does apraxia therapy support literacy? 

Letters and their sounds are the foundation of verbal communication and reading. 

SLPs can include literacy skills in apraxia therapy in a number of simple, fun ways.

Pair speech targets with specific letters.

You can write the letter “m” and point to it when a child is practicing that sound. You can also create word families of target words by grouping words that start with the same letter together: mom, my, moo, etc. 

It’s also helpful to connect the sound the letter makes to the letter itself. This reinforces accurate letter-sound pairing, which is a key literacy skill. 

Use decodable words that fit their speech goals

In apraxia therapy we don’t practice isolated sounds or syllables.  When you practice simple decodable words, work on reading and spelling. 

This gives the child the opportunity to practice their motor planning while simultaneously reading and spelling words. 

Incorporate literacy into short, intentional practice

Instead of adding additional time to a therapy session to focus on literacy skills, include the skills in the child’s regular apraxia therapy.

This keeps the practice short and allows the child to meaningfully engage without getting overwhelmed or fatigued. They won’t even know they’re working on multiple skills when structured well! 

You don’t need to become a reading specialist

Your main job in apraxia therapy is to focus on practicing proper motor planning and sequencing. 

You don’t need to become a literacy specialist! But that doesn’t mean you can’t help your clients make meaningful progress with their pre-literacy and reading skills. 

By monitoring and strengthening things like:

• Phonological awareness
• Letter-sound knowledge
• Oral language
• Vocabulary
• Writing
• Spelling

 You will address many of the foundational skills children need to read and write. 

 If you’d like to learn more about how to incorporate phonological awareness skills into your apraxia therapy sessions, click here for a free resource!