1. Learning disorders – a quick overview

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

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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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)

8. 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

9. 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/)

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