Students with Learning Disabilities Can Learn New Languages
Laura Grey is proficient in five languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian and German. She is also learning Russian, Mandarin Chinese and Dutch. She is doing this although she has a learning disability.
A learning disability is a condition that makes learning difficult.
Grey has dyslexia, a learning disability that makes reading, writing and spelling difficult.
“Nobody thought that I was dyslexic for a long time,” Grey said. “They had just thought that I had terrible handwriting and was a bad speller.”
The National Center for Education Statistics says that 13.8 percent of students learning English in the United States have a disability.
People with learning disabilities can have trouble reading, writing, spelling or understanding texts. Disabilities can be mild or severe.
Brenda Bernaldez is a specialist for the Office of English Language Programs in Mexico. She says teaching vocabulary words with pictures or using movable objects to show how words are formed can help students with disabilities.
Lía Kamhi-Stein is a professor at California State University in Los Angeles.
She said students with mild learning disabilities need to “develop the love for reading” in order to read better.
The students should choose what they want to read whether it is comics or books about animals.
She also said that vocabulary needs to be repeated multiple times.
For students struggling to read and write, experts suggest using voice recorders to take notes. Other useful apps help students learn vocabulary by reading and hearing words and looking at pictures.
