Helping Children with Learning Disabilities - Essay Example

Ways for practitioners to support learners with dyslexia, dyspraxia and hearing difficulty to overcome barriers to learning. In the contemporary teaching context, practitioners confront several types of learning disability including dyslexia, dyspraxia and hearing difficulty, and the studies in the field emphasize the role of the practitioners in providing support to enable learners with such learning disabilities in order to help them overcome barriers to learning. The practitioner in education has great responsibilities to take care of the special needs of students with learning disabilities in overcoming the various kinds of barriers to learning. It is essential to identify the students with special needs, although the identification of cross-over children is complex. In teaching practice, there is the risk of focusing on the deficit or special need in a particular area which is seen as the main area of concern, while ignoring the strengths of the students. The recommendable approach in teaching practice is to deal with the difficulty by focusing on the area of strength and this strategy can improve the self-esteem of the students with learning difficulty. "Certain conditions attract more sympathy and compassion and ultimately more support, for example, physical disability, visual or hearing impairment and chronic medical problems, whilst other conditions including, for example, dyslexia, dyspraxia, Asperger's syndrome and emotional and behavioural difficulties, may be viewed with scepticism and, in some cases, prejudice." (Benton and O'Brien, 85) Therefore, it is fundamental for practitioners to seek means to provide support to enable learners with dyslexia, dyspraxia and hearing difficulty to overcome barriers to learning and a thorough awareness of the issue at hand is most essential. This paper explores the various effective ways in which practitioners might provide valuable support to deal with the special needs of the learners with dyslexia, dyspraxia and hearing difficulty. One of the most essential responsibilities of the practitioners in the contemporary educational framework is to provide effective support to the learners with dyslexia, dyspraxia and hearing difficulty. The special educational needs of learners have always gained immense attention in the practice of teaching and there are various areas of special support required by these learners. Such special requirements for the learning of students with dyslexia, dyspraxia and hearing difficulty include flexible teaching arrangements, help with processing language, help and support in acquiring literacy skills, support in organising and coordinating spoken and written language and cognition, help with sequencing and organisational skills, help with problem solving and developing concepts, programmes to aid improvement of fine and motor competencies, support in the use of technical terms and abstract ideas, and help in understanding ideas, concepts, and experiences when information cannot be gained through first hand sensory and physical experience. "One understanding of inclusion is that it aims to encourage schools to reconsider their structure, teaching approaches, pupil grouping, and use of support so that the school responds the perceived needs of all its pupils. Teachers, collaborating closely, seek opportunities to look at new ways of involving all pupils and to draw on experimentation and reflection." (Farrell, 12) Therefore, it is essential for the practitioners to seek new ways to support learners with dyslexia, dyspraxia and hearing difficulty. Dyslexia refers to the problems with language with regard to reading, writing, spelling, and phonological problems and it results in severe learning issues in the classroom setting. It is a difficulty with receptive and expressive language in both its written and spoken forms and this constitutional difficulty is often hereditary. Learners with dyslexia have difficulties with reading, writing, spelling and oral language, along with difficulties with short-term memory, mathematics, concentration, sequencing, organisational skills, and processing speeds. In a close understanding of the learning difficulty of dyslexia, it becomes lucid that the individuals with specific reading impairment such as dyslexia encounter difficulty in recognising words in written text because the text becomes fragmented and message is disintegrated. There are research evidences which argue that strength-based learning support for reading comprehension in a constructive vein has positive results with the dyslexic learners. Most often, inclusive education pose new challenges to several teachers in changing individual learners with special educational needs entering their classroom, utilising their strengths and contending with their barriers to learning in a unique way. Therefore, it is essential for the schools to make adaptations to meet the educational needs of all its style of instruction. The dyslexic students have phonological and visual processing deficits which contribute to their problems with decoding and word recognition and they stumble over words. "Learners with a learning impairment do not automatically apply active learning strategies, such as the monitoring skills of meta-cognition and the questioning/prediction of events. Therefore, learning support to these learners should include a distinctly holistic and meaning-based component that focuses on the enhancement of thinking skills." (Ghesquire and Ruijssenaars, 134) It is essential to implement specific strategies of teaching in dealing with the special needs of dyslexic students and the most important step is to give extra consideration to such students in any areas which involve reading, writing or maths. Significantly, a dyslexic learner finds it laborious to scan along a line of text, and they should not be asked to read aloud in class. Such experiences of being asked to read aloud in classroom will cause them to experience stomach aches, headaches and extreme anxiety, which in turn results in loss of self-esteem and sometimes in school refusal. "Copying from the board frequently causes great difficulties, and a dyslexic child should be placed at the front of the class with an unobstructed view of the board. It can make things a lot more manageable if writing on the board is not joined but printed clearly by the teacher. Homework should be written on the board well before the end of the lesson in very clear printing, as it will take a dyslexic child twice as long to visually scan the words and copy them down." (Dyslexia Teaching Today) The dyslexic learners experience failure many times each day because their disability is not visible to teachers and their self-esteem suffers. Therefore, the teachers should be highly careful about the special needs of these students. The common accommodations for dyslexic students studying and taking exams in the classroom setting include oral testing, untimed tests, elimination of the spelling tests, reduction of homework load, grade on content, not spelling nor handwriting, and cutback of oral reading etc. The role of the practitioner in dealing with dyslexic learners is vital as they deliver quality first teaching for literacy and they are best placed to identify and support dyslexic learners. It is important for them to provide 'dyslexia-friendly' inclusive classroom, examine the learner's literacy progress and effectiveness of interventions, and to refer for additional in-school support if required. Also known as Developmental Co-ordination Disorder (DCD), dyspraxia is the difficulty with word meaning and it results if there is impairment in any of the three abilities which are required for effective praxis such as the abilities to conceptualise, organize and execute sequences of unfamiliar actions. "It is used to describe a condition in which people have difficulty planning and carrying out non-habitual motor skills. It involves impairment in the ability to perform familiar or unfamiliar motor skills with automaticity" (Ott, 263) Dyspraxia can be comprehended as a neurologically-based disorder and it affects the learners in their conceptualisation, planning and carrying out of sensory/motor tasks. As it is associated with problems of perception, language and thought, dyspraxia affects the planning of what to do and how to do it. The developmental dyspraxia consists of three types of disability such as the oral dyspraxia, developmental verbal dyspraxia and motor dyspraxia. "Oral dyspraxia is associated with difficulty in reproducing mouth movements even though it may be done unconsciously. Students with Developmental Verbal Dyspraxia have difficulty in making sounds into words. A student may have difficulty in producing sounds in the beginning, middle or end of words. Motor Dyspraxia inhibits an individual from moving as planned and organising sensory input." (Dyspraxia) It is essential to adopt effective strategies to support learners with dyspraxia in classroom and the role of an educational practitioner is of high recognition. As the student with dyspraxia fond it laborious to write well, the teacher may encourage the use of keyboard at an early age and allow the student to type out assignments. The practitioner also can reduce copying from paper or the whiteboard by providing printed materials which will be highly useful in improving the learner's self-esteem. It is important to emphasis fun, effort and participation rather than proficiency in the classroom activities. The practitioner also may "plan activities that will develop key skills that prove particularly difficult for student with dyspraxia such as a sense of balance, spatial organization, hand eye coordination and eye foot coordination." (Dyspraxia) The educationists dealing with learning disabilities of learners or special needs children also confront the problems of the learners with hearing difficulty and effective strategies to include the special needs of such learners gain great importance in the contemporary teaching practice. "A hearing impairment can have devastating effects on the learning process, especially speech and language development. Children who are born deaf or experience a significant hearing loss within the first two years of life usually do not develop normal speech and language patterns. The hearing impairment interferes with the young child's ability to imitate the speech patterns of parents and those around him." (Boyles and Contadino, 298) Therefore, the teachers need to adopt strategies to incorporate the special needs of the learners with hearing difficulty. It is important to create the right environment for the teaching of such special-needs learners and they must be given opportunity to have a clear and direct view of the mouth and face of the teachers. While the hearing aids can be highly useful to a great extent, such strategies must be supported by other environmental conditions which help them recognise the learning items. In conclusion, the educational practitioners confront several vital challenges in their practice and they have fundamental responsibilities to provide support to enable learners with dyslexia, dyspraxia and hearing difficulty to overcome barriers to learning. The special needs of these learners greatly vary and the role of the practitioners in accommodating their learning requirements is often stressed. Works Cited Benton, Peter and Tim O'Brien. Special needs and the beginning teacher. Continuum International Publishing Group. 2000. P 85. Boyles, Nancy S. and Darlene Contadino. The Learning Differences Sourcebook. McGraw-Hill Professional. 1997. P 298. "Dyslexia Teaching Today." Dyslexia Teacher. 26 Aug, 2009. . "Dyspraxia." Learning Disabilities. Special Needs. 2009. 26 Aug, 2009. . Farrell, Michael. The effective teacher's guide to dyslexia and other specific learning difficulties: practical strategies. Taylor & Francis. 2005. P 12. Ghesquire, Pol and A. J. J. M. Ruijssenaars. Learning disabilities: a challenge to teaching and instruction. Leuven University Press. 2005. P 134. Ott, Philomena. Teaching children with dyslexia: a practical guide. London: Routledge. 2007. P 263. Read More