Constrained Skills In Early Childhood

Reading is an essential life skill. The ultimate goal of reading is to comprehend and make meaningful connections with text. Therefore, the development of skills needed for reading begins at an early age and progresses through stages into adulthood (Chall, 1996). Within the early stages of reading development, children begin learning and acquiring these specific skills. Moreover, many of the skills learned during early childhood are constrained skills. Constrained skills are the quickest to develop and master, such as decoding, fluency, and word recognition (Kintsch, 2004; Paris & Hamilton, 2009). As children acquire and become automatic in these reading skills, these constrained skills aid the child in a smooth transition to the later stages of reading development where there is a heavy focus on unconstrained skills. Unconstrained skills such as comprehension, vocabulary, and composition, continually develop over time making them much more complex with uncertainties of when or how they become automatic (Kamhi, 2009;
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29). Learning disabilities, as defined by the National Center for Learning Disabilities (2014), are "neurological differences in brain structure and function and affect a person 's ability to receive, store, process, retrieve or communicate information" (p. 3). Furthermore, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (2004) defines a learning disability as a disorder that affects one or more of the basic processes involved in understanding or using language, spoken or written. Students receiving special education services under IDEA must demonstrate that their disability significantly impacts their learning. For many students who struggle to read because of a learning disability, they perceive and sense the impact their disability has on their