I am a pre-service teacher looking for any information on how to keep students with learning disabilities from falling behind the rest of the class. Please email me with any suggestions at the above address. Thank you for your time.
Amy
you will never succeed
How do you respond when a teacher tells you that your child will never progress in Spanish past the second year? Is this appropriate to even tell parents this? I have a son in high school who is struggling with Spanish. His verbal IQ score is above average. The teacher does not tell me why my child cannot progress, she just knows. Unfortunately she is the only Spanish teacher, as we are in a very small school.
Re: you will never succeed
Unless your son has very large deficits othewise, just ignore her.
She may be trying to tell you that the demands are very different in intermediate language. In the basic levels in the first two classes, there is a lot of pure memorization and patterned responses. In the intermediate levels, the third and fourth courses, there is more unstructured work — reading without strict vocabulary/structure controls, open-ended questions where you have to say or write an original response that you haven’t prepared or studied beforehand. The same situation as children in reading in English moving from Grade 2-3 very patterned short-answer reading and writing, to Grade 4 reading-to-learn, and the same problem with students who depend on memorization and other coping mechanisms hitting a brick wall. If your son *does* have other problems, think about this carefully.
If you are sure he is up to the new demands, make a pre-emptive visit to the principal saying that you don’t like her attitude and if your son takes third year Spanish and the teacher is down on him, you will make formal anti-discrimination complaints to the school board. In fact, put this in writing and keep a copy.
Then, get him going on Spanish out of the classroom situation. Look at summer classes at a college or a summer visit to Mexico. Buy a CD (I hear good things about Rosetta Stone) that has speech included and make sure he uses it at least three times a week. If he is already familiar with the language from other sources, the classroom will make a heck of a lot more sense.
Re: keeping all students on track
You have often made the comment about how much repetition LD children need. I have believed you but your comments have taken on new meaning as my youngest child (K) now is learning to read. You tell him something and he remembers it. It is unbelievable. He is now decoding words like bike and weed and stamp. He even told me the other day that “pink” was spelled “pinck” When I told him the correct spelling, he told me the “K’ sound is usually “ck” at the end of a word!!
I am happy for him but sad for my LD child. My K son is reading (slowly) what my LD son read in second grade. The difference in the effort expended is just amazing.
And his K teacher says he is progressing nicely, suggesting to me that he is nothing but typical.
Beth
Bottom line in my experience is that the best bet is early identification, in K or 1, and very intensive daily remediation.
There is no, absolutely no, getting around the fact that processing deficits affect learning. Students who have often multiple processing deficits need far more direct instruction to perform cognitive operations than students who do not have these deficits need. This translates into more teaching time and usually slower progress. While this is occuring, while we are busy teaching students phonological processing skills that the average to above nonLD child brings with him or her, the average to above nonLD child is making progress in reading at a faster pace.
Another issue is often processing speed. It becomes common in my program to get my students at or very close to grade level in word reading skills, but processing speed often slows reading down to half the rate of the nonLD average to above average reader. This area remediates slowly and frequently never fully remediates, though it improves.
Again, early identification produces the best results. Another factor I would stress is the intensity of remediation. Get them into a remedial program in first grade and get them good, daily intensive instruction in a very small group. It only makes sense that 1:1 is the best. 1:1 keeps the child engaged 100% of the time. The child is interacting steadily and constantly with the instructor. The child is responding and answering questions.
Once you to to even 2:1 that drops in half. The child is responding less often, yes there are some tricks to increasing response frequency. By the time you get 4 or 6 to 1, you may well have to be really on your toes to keep the students on task and attentive every moment. While you are engaging in brief error correction with one child, the other five may take a 30 second mental vacation (esp. if that child did not need that particular error correction), then they have to be redirected. Many times these young ones have a touch of attention deficit along with the LD.