|
Not every sign or symptom will be present in each child with a specific learning difficulty, although there is usually a sufficient cluster of these indicators to lead to a diagnosis.
Long before a child arrives at Grade 4 there may be several indicators:- Difficulty with fastening his/her coat, shoe-laces, or tie.
- Difficulty understanding prepositions connected with direction (e.g. in/out, before/behind)
- Difficulty in carrying out more than one instruction at a time
- Possible history of slow speech development and an excessive number of spoonerisms
- Difficulty in finding the name for an object
- Confusion between left and right
- Undetermined hand preference
- Poor handwriting with many reversals and badly formed letters
- Difficulty in remembering anything in a sequential order (e.g. days of the week and the alphabet)
- Difficulty in remembering what day it is, their birthday, and in learning to tell time
- Poor reading progress on both look-and-say and phonic methods
- Excessive tiredness due to the amount of concentration and effort required
Many of these pointers are still evident during the elementary school years together with more specific reading and writing errors. These might include:- Hesitant and laboured reading especially when reading aloud, often missing out words or adding extra words or failing to recognise "familiar" words
- Missing out a line or reading the same line twice
- Repeatedly losing the place
- Confusion with similar looking words (e.g. on/no, for/of/off/from)
- Difficulty in breaking down long words into syllables and putting the syllables back into the correct order - often syllables are missed out
- Disregard for punctuation
- Making anagrams of words (e.g. "tired" for "tried", "breaded" for "bearded")
- Difficulty in picking out the most important points from a passage
- Inability to blend letters together
- Difficulty learning multiplication tables
Specific writing and spelling errors might also include:- Poor standards of written work in comparison with oral ability
- Messy work with many crossings out and words tried several times (e.g. wippe -> wype -> wiep -> wipe)
- Persistant confusion with letters which look alike particularly b/d, p/g, p/q, n/u, m/w.
- Wrong choice of letters due to poor auditory discrimination particularly between the vowel sounds a/e/i/o/u; also between t/d, p/d, and m/n
- Confusion between letter names and sounds (e.g. "nd" for "end", "ne" for "any")
- Indiscriminate use of upper case letters usually because the child feels moer secure with the capital form (e.g. raBBit)
- Confusion between similarly sounding words (e.g. "accept" for "except", "out" for "are")
- Letters, syllables, and words omitted, inserted, or in one piece of writing
- A word spelt several different ways in one piece of writing
- Crossing "I" but failing to cross "t" or dot "i" (e.g. "tillte" for "little")
- Badly set out written work; inability to stay close to the margin
- Losing the point of the story being written
- Lack of or indiscriminate use of punctuation
(Reference: The British Dyslexia Association. The BDA is an excellent source of information for anyone interested in specific learning difficulties.)
HOME | SPECIFIC LEARNING DIFFICULTIES | INDICATORS | OUR APPROACH
PRODUCTS | OUR LOCATION | CONTACT US | LINKS |
