Answer to Question 1
Children with impairment in written expression often have problems with tasks that require eyehand coordination, despite their normal gross motor development. Teachers notice that, as compared with children who have normal writing skills, children with impairments in writing produce shorter, less interesting, and poorly organized essays and are less likely to review spelling, punctuation, and grammar to increase clarity (Hooper et al., 2011, 2013). However, spelling errors or poor handwriting that do not significantly interfere with daily activities or academic pursuits do not qualify a child for this diagnosis. In addition, problems in written expression signal the possibility of other learning problems because of shared metacognitive processes: planning, self-monitoring, self-evaluation, and self-modification (Heim & Benasich, 2006).
Answer to Question 2
A child with a SLD with impairment in reading lacks the critical language skills required for basic reading: word reading accuracy, reading comprehension, and reading rate or fluency. Dyslexia is an alternative term sometimes used to describe this pattern of reading difficulties. These core deficits stem from problems in decodingbreaking a word into parts rapidly enough to read the whole wordcoupled with difficulty reading single small words (Vellutino et al., 2007). When a child cannot detect the phonological structure of language and automatically recognize simple words, reading development will very likely be impaired (Peterson & Pennington, 2010). The slow and labored decoding of single words requires substantial effort and detracts from the child's ability to retain the meaning of a sentence, much less a paragraph or page.