Reading And Writing Difficulties

Reading and writing is part of nation-building and it is the most important linguistic skill that needs to be developed in young learners. According to Rozendal & Green (2002:131), the ability to read is a critical component of school success and a strong correlation exists between poor reading ability and school failure. Reading and writing is critical for learning and if learners have not properly mastered the skill their potential for success in the learning context is hampered. Reading is important for learning as it gives learners independent access to a vast world of information as well as fulfillment and pleasure in what they do. Writing on the other hand gives learners the pleasure of most likely to remember what they have learnt.

The challenges mostly arise when it comes to reading and writing a different language, which is not the mother tongue. Writing has been characterized as the most challenging of the literacy domains (Nelson and Nelson (1978) underscore the difficulty of writing by describing it as "a complex of interconnected systems" (p. 278). Writing requires simultaneous use of phonological, graphic, orthographic, semantic, syntactic, and discourse rule systems (Dyson & Freedman, 1991, p. 762). As far as reading and writing problems are to be solved, research studies focus on the remedies and state that the continuous exposure to material is the only solution especially when a second language is taught. Reading and writing problem is one of the categories of learning disabilities that falls under special needs education. It is a combination of abilities and difficulties which affect the learning process and is evident when accurate and fluent 11 word reading and/ or writing develops with great difficulty. It is generally accepted that as their primary school careers unfolds, learners gradually move from the stage of ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn’. However, for a significant number of learners, this is not the case and as they progress through their primary years, they still do not read fluently. Since the reading difficulty impacts on all areas of

Teachers should give the parents and pupils examples of successful people who had reading and writing problem in school (Shaywiz, 2003). The procedures utilized to relate and organize new information on to the previous understanding and to keep it in a good way, have implications for how easily the pupil will be in a position to retrieve the information in future. Teachers have always said that learners with reading and writing problem may know information at one time but fail to recall it the next time. The problem may not be with the memory but how the information was processed. Working memory enables people to exploit their memory systems extensively. It allows people to remember information through rehearsals in the minds, to relate this information to the previous knowledge and to plan the future operation (Alberta Education,