ABSTRACT
Speaking and listening skills are fundamental to all types of social interaction, intrinsic to many leisure activities, necessary for most types of work and essential to all aspects of education. Providing children with opportunities to develop their spoken language abilities is part of the National Curriculum in England and Wales. Spoken language is rightly viewed as a different domain from written language. Learning to read and write an alphabetic script such as English depends on intact underlying speech and language skills. Children with speech impairments may be slower than their peer group in grasping the fundamentals that are part of the early literacy curriculum. The child with speech impairment is usually conspicuous because of the way he or she talks. Children who persist in using developmental error patterns have delayed phonological development. Some children with speech impairments do have difficulty with actual articulation of speech sounds. These children will need additional help in learning how to produce the problem sounds.
