Case 4 Learning disabilities: dyslexia, dyscalculia, non-verbal learning disorder
1. When do you diagnose a learning disability?
- A: Ongoing difficulties in the school-age years learning and using at least one
academic skill (e.g. reading accuracy/fluency; spelling accuracy; written expression
competence and fluency; mastering number facts). These difficulties have persisted
and failed to improve as expected, despite the provision of targeted intervention for at
least six months. This intervention should be recognised as evidence-based and ideally
delivered by an experienced and qualified person.
- B: The difficulties experienced by the student will be assessed using standardised
achievement tests* and found to be at a level significantly lower than most students of
the same age. Sometimes students are identified with a learning disability even though
they are performing within the average range. This is only the case when it can be
shown that the student is achieving at this level due to unusually high levels of effort
and ongoing support.
- C: The difficulties experienced by the student usually become apparent in the early
years of schooling. The exception to this is where problems occur in upper-primary or
secondary school once the demands on student performance increase significantly. For
example – when students have to read extended pieces of complex text or write at a
more sophisticated level under timed conditions.
- D: Specific learning disabilities will not be diagnosed if there is a more plausible
explanation for the difficulties being experienced by the student. For example – if the
student has: an intellectual disability; a sensory impairment; a history of chronic
absenteeism; inadequate proficiency in the language of instruction; a psychosocial
condition; or, not received appropriate instruction and/or intervention.
2. Does this girl have dyslexia? Why or why not?
Chapter Reed Reading
- developmental dyslexia across languages and scripts is usually a phonological
disorder. The child with developmental dyslexia has a serious and specific difficulty
with the neural representation of the sounds that make up words.
Typical Neuropsychological Development of Reading across Languages
- phonological awareness" is usually defined as the ability to detect and manipulate
component sounds in words. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in words that
change meaning. the primary phonological processing unit across most of the world's
languages is the syllable. Syllables consist of a consonant (C) and a vowel (V). The
CV syllable structure characterizes spoken languages. dividing a syllable into its
component sounds is relatively easy. Most syllables contain two sounds, an onset
comprising a single phoneme, and a rime comprising a single phoneme. In fact, for
languages with a CV syllable structure, there is no distinction between phonemes,
onsets, and rimes. This makes it easier to become phonologically aware.
- phonological awareness develops from the phonological representations that underpin
spoken language. During the first four or five years of their linguistic development,
children are acquiring spoken language, not written language. Their focus is
communication, and not phonological awareness, and they know about phonology at
an implicit level, by being competent users of their language. typically developing
children seldom produce the wrong word during communication, apart from slips of
the tongue (which adults produce as well). A prereading child in fact recognizes
phonological similarities that, as literate adults, we no longer notice. Despite the
differences in syllable structure and in the absolute number of phonemes found in the
phonological inventories of different languages, children in all languages so far
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, studied appear to follow a similar developmental pathway in terms of phonological
awareness. Children first become aware of relatively large sounds in words, such as
syllables. They then become aware of the onset/rime division of the syllable (str-eet, j-
ump, tr-ip). Awareness of phonemes develops later in children learning to speak
languages with a complex phonology, such as English and German. Pre-readers in
English and German are aware of onsets and rimes, but they cannot recognize or
manipulate phonemes. However, pre-readers in languages like Italian and Spanish do
not have a problem. For them, onsets and rimes are also phonemes because of the
simple phonology of the CV syllable.
- The best way to investigate the sequence of phonological development is to equate the
cognitive demands of the chosen task across linguistic level. For example, an oddity
task or a same-different judgment task can be used to compare both onset/rime and
phoneme levels of awareness. English-speaking children generally mastered word-
level skills before they mastered syllable-level skills; they mastered syllable-level
skills before onset/ rime-level skills; and they mastered onset/rime-level skills before
phoneme skills. syllable awareness emerges prior to phoneme awareness in children
learning all languages so far studied. syllabic awareness was present in pre-readers,
phonemic awareness was dependent on learning to read.
- longitudinal connection between individual differences in children's phonological
awareness measured prior to schooling and their later progress in reading and spelling.
This longitudinal correlation remained significant even when other factors such as IQ
and socioeconomic status were controlled. It was also specific to reading, as no
significant longitudinal correlations were found for development in mathematics.
significant relationship between nursery rhyme knowledge at the age of 3 and success
in reading and spelling at the ages of 5 and 6. intervention, the children in the
experimental group which had had plastic letters training were 8 months further on in
reading than the children in the semantic control group, and 12 months further on in
spelling, even after adjusting post-test scores for age and IQ. A second control group
was" unseen," comprising children who had spent the intervening period receiving
normal classroom teaching without an additional intervention. Compared to these
children, the experimental group was a remarkable 24 months further on in spelling,
and 12 months further on in reading
- the links between phonological awareness and literacy appear to be language-
universal. In all languages so far studied, phonological awareness progresses from an
awareness of large units of sound, such as syllables and rimes, to an awareness of
small units of sound-phonemes. In all languages so far studied, including character-
based scripts, individual differences in phonological awareness are predictive of
individual differences in literacy. Finally, in all languages so far studied, providing
children with training in phonological awareness which is coupled with training in
how letters represent sounds has a measurable positive impact on progress in literary.
Let us now consider how differences in the phonological structure of different
languages might affect the ways in which early phonological awareness can support
the acquisition of literary.
The acquisition of reading and spelling skills across languages
- Learning letters helps to develop phoneme awareness in all languages. for most
European children be in learn languages, acquisition of phoneme awareness is very
rapid once children begin learning to read. For English children it is not. English is
particularly ambiguous with respect to both spelling-to-sound and sound to-spelling
relations. Children who are learning to read a language with a simple CV syllable
structure and a transparent orthography learn to read simple words efficiently within
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