Language Based Learning Disabilities

Ordinarily, most who hear this term believes it means seeing words wrong or reversing letters. Dyslexics ' are categorized as being unable to read, write, or spell (Schmitt & Clemens, 1994, Preface). The literal translation of dyslexia means “impaired words” (Schmitt & Clemens, 1994, p. 142), nevertheless dyslexia stretches far beyond reading and writing, although these are the most obvious handicaps, which Schmitt struggled with daily. Dyslexia causes a person to favor the right hemisphere of their brain than the left hemisphere, therefore “people with congenital or acquired dyslexia often have left-side handicaps that are so severe that most of their mental processes are delegated to the right hemispheres of their brains” (Schmitt & Clemens, 1994, p. 133). The left hemisphere of the brain is normally specialized in taking care of the analytical and verbal tasks, i.e. language skills, skilled movement, and analytical time sequence processing3. Consequently, “western cultures [favor] the characteristics of left-side functioning, our educational system reflects that bias and is heavily weighted against those individuals whose physiologic makeup has granted them attributes of creativity, imagination, and fantasy” (Schmitt & Clemens, 1994, p. 133). Schmitt shares his journey from being known as an idiot to proving to the world he is brilliant, highlighting on moments of success and

I was diagnosed with dyslexia during my 10th grade as I was slow in learning and writing. I was provided with accommodations for my 10th and 12th grade Board examination by the Central Board of Secondary Education. However, I did not use accommodations during my undergraduate study in MBBS and I had progressively improved in my scores and writing speed with the help of peers and teaching faculty and my own perseverance. With how far I have progressed scholastically, I strongly believe I can independently perform tasks without any aid.

The key points from this week’s text reading discussed issues that special educations teachers need to know relating to vocabulary, law and identification of intellectual disabilities (ID). We learned about how ID characteristics impact education, social attitudes and academic needs of students, their families and the communities they live. The reading from the assigned from our textbook and the websites gave my an excellent base understanding of intellectual disabilities.

One of the things that has been a struggle for me over the years is the slowness of my reading and the process of absorbing written materials. I was always a bad speller and had a

When I was a child, I always had to read paragraphs multiple times because I struggled with reading. This caused me to spend more time on reading than other children reading the same material. I thought I was stupid. Then one morning, my mother told me that I had dyslexia. Dyslexia causes reading and writing to require more energy and time. Though I was relieved to know that I was not doomed to a life of unintelligence, this only confirmed that I would have to work harder than everyone else in academics. Instead of crippling me, this empowered me. I used dyslexia as a motivator to work harder in every area of my life.

Of course, we are not talking here about students whose comprehension is severely impaired, because they are usually schooled individually and have a special grading system, adjusted to their needs and abilities. But in the classrooms there are often students with less obvious disabilities, which, although less severe, can also create academic challenges. Some of them, such as dyslexia or dyscalculia, are directly related to learning and may affect the speed at which students acquire the material. Others, such as anxiety or ADHD may not only disrupt learning, but also are very likely to cause discrepancies between the students’ subject knowledge and their exam and assignment results.

Many children at school are capable of hiding their learning difficulties by steering clear from reading aloud or writing very little (Reid 2013, p13).Not to mention, the Report of the Task force on Dyslexia (2001) states learning difficulties from dyslexia occurs across the lifespan of a person and can vary from mild to severe at different ages (Report of the Task Force on Dyslexia, 2001). It is extremely vital for teachers to be fully aware and trained in the area of dyslexia. Teacher’s use of differentiation in their subjects in the classroom is a strong fundamental in order to meet the needs of a student with a learning difficulty like

In Scott Sonnon’s book A Mountain Stands: Confessions of a Suppressed Genius Sonnon says, “Dyslexia was not my deficit, but my advantage.” By clinical definition, dyslexia is a language-based learning disability, which affects an individual’s aptitude to read due to complications identifying sounds and linking letters and words. In elementary school, I was diagnosed with severe Dyslexia. Since my diagnosis, many aspects of my life have been defined by others’ perception of Dyslexia, which caused me to have a negative outlook on my learning disability. Through the progression of my educational career, I began to realize that my learning disability was a blessing in disguise.

“Children know how to learn in more ways than we know how to teach them.”

Everyone in this world have different ways of knowing how to read. All readers all somehow start off by knowing nothing, and experiencing many different ways in learning to read. Jimmy Santiago Baca didn’t know how to read, but still managed to become a famous American poet in Apache and Chicano background and was incarcerated for drug possession. Gareth Cook also became a famous even though he struggled with dyslexia he still managed to become a writer for The New Yorker. Many people will not learn how to read if they struggle with disabilities but because Cook was always embarrassed of how he read when picked in class by his teachers. Since Cook didn’t know what he will always stutter while reading, until college

The timing of identification was similar in each group. The proportion of students diagnosed with LD who were ELL matches the portion in the schools in the group with RTI. The proportion who were ELL in comparison group suggests underrepresentation with 16% of students diagnosed with LD in schools were 50 percent of students are ELL. Reading difficulties of students with vocabulary and comprehension problems became increasingly prominent as more ELL students were identified as learning disabled in third through fifth

David Bois, a dyslexic lawyer and litigator, has struggled with reading all his life, but he had a "childhood fascination with the law and decided that he would go to law school," which requires a lot of reading, but because of his dyslexia, he could not read like everyone else (2). Although, ever since he was born, he has been meticulously listening, because as he says, “Listening… was the only way I could learn,” he had to scramble and adapt and come up with some kind of strategy that allowed him to keep pace with everyone around him (2). His peers would be reliant on reading and studying to succeed in school, and to succeed in a law career. Thankfully, when he was in school his listening is what kept him ahead of the game because, “while everyone else furiously made notes or doodled or lapsed into daydreams,” he would focus in on everything that was said and written, and paste it all into his memory (2). He was mentally advanced compared to his fellow students, because everything he needed to study or review has already been drilled into his mind. This type of learning, of which is common amongst dyslexics is called “compensation learning,” which means they are trying “to compensate for something that [has] been taken away from them,” they do

Dyslexia is a language-based disorder that has specific tell-tale signs and there are effective ways to help people with dyslexia.

I concur specific learners does need additional help in achieving literacy. Moreover, important multiple resources are available for students with disabilities considering their challenges. Therefore, educators will adhere to individual’s constitutional rights when distinctive issues arise.

Attention deficit is an attention difficulty, hyperactivity, and impulsiveness disorder, also known as ADHD and/or ADD. Some teachers believe that if a student does not understand their work they start to act out and distract the rest of the class. Sometimes this is true but sometimes it could be just be the child ADHD and/or ADD. In other experiment done by Catts, he wanted to find out can having a speech language problem be the cause of a reading disability. Catts is a faculty member at Florida State University in the department of Communication & Information. In his study he used 56 children with speech language problems and 30 without and gave them a series of test. From the results, we learned “that children with speech-language impairments are at an increased risk for reading disabilities” (Catts, 1993, p. 948). Since, most speech language problems can be