Learning Difficulties

The term learning disability refers to children with normal intelligence without organic and physical causes but who are still unable to follow the common educational programme successfully. On entering school where the child is compared with the other children in his/her class, the first signs of the child's difficulties may appear if they have not already appeared in pre-school (e.g. the child did not speak clearly)

Indications :

• Does your child have problems expressing his/her thoughts in writing when he/she can do it orally?
• Does he forget or not understand what he reads?
• Does he/she have problems reading, spelling, misreads words, does not colour his/her voice or gets very tired while reading (see Irlen and learning difficulties for more details)
• Does it have bad handwriting?
• Does he make a lot of spelling mistakes?
• Is he having general problems adjusting to school?
• Is he confusing the letters?
• Is he skipping letters?
• Is he confusing uppercase and lowercase?
• Does he glue the words together or does he not punctuate?

The above picture represents a picture of a dyslexic student so it needs to be investigated in depth whether the problem is dyslexia, specific learning difficulties or there is a perceptual visual problem related to the recording of information in the brain (see Irlen syndrome)

Remedy

It is important when we see that the child wants to participate in class but cannot refer to a specialist, even if he/she overcomes minor problems since the difficulties may be "hidden" in some way but may reappear in older classes. The child's specific difficulties are often not recognized by the teacher or pediatrician. Early diagnosis and intervention where needed is therefore undoubtedly the best way to deal with it.

The role of the speech and language therapist : The specialist speech and language therapist will identify exactly what the child's difficulties are and start the appropriate therapeutic-teaching rehabilitation programme. The rehabilitation is based on cooperation with parents and school and helps to prevent secondary problems such as marginalization at school, low self-confidence, frustration of the student, etc. The speech and language therapist will help you to understand the child both you and the teacher so that a healthy and safe remediation program for the specific learning problem can be established.