A 4th grade student with a language impairment impacting semantic knowledge would most likely struggle with which literacy skill?

A student with a language impairment that specifically affects semantic knowledge would primarily struggle with reading comprehension. This skill entails understanding and interpreting the meaning of words, phrases, and texts. Semantic knowledge involves the understanding of vocabulary and the relationships between words, which is crucial for grasping the main ideas and details in a reading passage.

When a student has weak semantic skills, they may find it difficult to make inferences, draw conclusions, and connect ideas from the text to their existing knowledge, all of which are essential components of reading comprehension. In contrast, skills like decoding words phonetically, reading fluency, and orthographic processing may not be as directly impacted by semantic knowledge. Decoding concerns the ability to sound out words, reading fluency relates to the smoothness of reading, and orthographic processing deals with recognizing written words and their spellings, which can occur relatively independently from a student's semantic understanding. Thus, the most significant area of struggle for a student with impaired semantic knowledge is indeed reading comprehension.