Learning disorders – a quick overview

Learning disorder – significant difficulty in academic learning that results in a clinical diagnosis There is no medical treatment.

Types of learning disorders Reading disorder – known as dyslexia, which is often characterized by difficulties with the alphabet, word recognition, decoding, spelling and comprehension

How does dyslexia present? Students with dyslexia might have difficulty: Memorizing non-phonetic words Reading words that have no mental pictures associated with them (e.g. and, the, a, therefore, etc.) Reading aloud without repeated mistakes Retelling a story in the right sequence Finding words in a dictionary, naming days of the week and months of the year Understanding inferences, jokes or sarcasm

How does dyslexia present? cont’d Students with dyslexia might have difficulty: Expressing ideas clearly; using a lot of ‘um’ Learning new vocabulary Recalling numbers in sequence Reading and understanding materials Learning words to songs Telling left from right Telling time

Types of disorders cont’d Spelling disorder (dysorthographia) – difficulty in spelling due to weak awareness or memory of language structures and letters in a word

How does dysorthographia present? A student might show difficulties with the following: Addition, omission and/or substitution of letters in words Reversal of vowels and/or syllables Slow, hesitant or poor written expression Errors in conjugation and grammar Phonetic spelling of non-phonetic words (e.g. cough – coff)

Types of disorders cont’d Auditory Processing Disorder – affects the way the brain processes or interpret what it hears even though there is no hearing problem

How does Auditory Processing Disorder present? An adult with this disorder might have difficulty with the following: Listening when there is background noise Processing information when the speaker is speaking too quickly Recalling what has been said (e.g. following directions) Using phonemes incorrectly when speaking (e.g. rip and lip – phonemes /r/ and /l/)

Auditory Processing Disorder May also have difficulty in: focusing on verbal presentations Understanding complex sentence structure