Dyslexia or Learning Disability – 8

While constructing a sentence, children with LD may find it hard to structure their sentence grammatically. They commit errors with syntax. They can not string the words in the right order. They may write, “road goes on the car” instead of “car goes on the road”. Passive voice poses problem to them. The sentence “cat chases the rat” in passive voice may become “rat chases the cat”! “Rat is chased by the cat” would be too confusing to understand who is chasing whom! They struggle to express their ideas through writing or through speech. They may fumble for words or stop mid way in a sentence unable to understand how to proceed. Single line answers are easy to understand, but long answers are difficult to comprehend because of their confusion with sequencing of events/ideas. 

Some children who have above average intellectual levels may find writing task very difficult. Their thoughts would be running at such high speed that their writing pace can not match the speed of their thought flow! And many find the repetitive writing tasks very boring and meaningless. Hence a reluctance to write.

Teachers need to be sensitive to their reading and writing difficulties. They should not pick these children and force them to read out a passage from the text book aloud in front of their peers. Anxiety increases their confusion and makes them commit even more mistakes.

Spelling difficulty is once again due to the inability to order the letters in sequence. Some may be good in phonetics and they may spell the word as they hear the sound (auditory speller) – fone for phone, nife for knife, nite for night, lefant for elephant (more like the current day mobile SMS spellings). Some children write bizarre spellings – totally unconnected to the word. To learn spellings, the child should have good visual memory to visualize the whole word in his mind and reproduce it or he must have good phonetic skill to divide the word into different syllables and learn the spelling of each syllable and string it together. This method is called syllabication or syllabification. The word “difficult” can be segmented into dif-fi-cult, the word television into te-le-vi-sion,  construction into con-st-ruc-tion, mansion into man-sion.  Here again there can be confusion between “tion” or “sion” and this portion of the word they need to visually remember.

To learn the spellings, the child also needs to master the sound-letter association. After single letter sounds, child needs to learn consonant blends, like, ‘pl’, ‘br’, ’sp’, ‘cr’, ’spr’, ’spl’, ’str’, ‘thr’ etc, consonant digraphs, like, ‘ch’, ’sh’, ‘wh’ (2 letters making single sound), vowel sounds and many other letter combinations.

Numbers once again may pose problems to many children. While writing they may mirror certain numbers like, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7  and 9. They may read the number in reverse order, like, 23 as 32, 12 as 21 etc. Counting one-to-one will be difficult, concept of money can be hard to learn, Clock reading may become difficult. Temporal words like ‘before’, ‘after’, ’some days ago’, ’some days later ‘, ‘next month’, ’last year’ etc would be difficult to conceive.

Simple addition and subtraction may be learnt easily, but graded sums would be difficult. The concept of ‘carry over’ in addition and ‘borrow’ in subtraction would be tough. Learning the multiplication table would be difficult as it requires sequencing ability and hence find multiplication sums difficult. So also the division sum.

Statement sums pose a big problem as the arithmetic language involved would be difficult to understand and they can not comprehend the different operations involved in the sum. Even if they were to understand the operations like addition and subtraction involved, they may get confused with the sequence of these operations.

……………….. to be continued