Relationship Between Oral Language and the Reading Process

Oral language plays an important factor in a child's ability to read.  Children begin to develop language from the day they are born.  They learn how to recognize and develop sounds, they learn how words are formed and how they are related to each other, and they learn how language conveys meaning.  These aspects of language development are what lay the foundation for learning to read.  When you really think about it, oral language is the first thing a child brings to the reading process.  It is their oral language that helps them construct meaning, which in turn helps the child in both decoding and comprehension.  If a student has a weak oral language, it can interfere with a child's ability to learn to read.  Therefore, it is essential that parents, caretakers, and teachers do everything they can to support language development from the very beginning.