Lois Letchford: Difference Between a Language Problem & A Learning Problem

28 Aug 2018 · 2 min

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Lois Letchford describes Nicholas, a child misdiagnosed with a learning disability when he actually had an auditory processing disorder slowing his language intake and expression. With poetry, rhyming, and repetitive language work, Nicholas learned robustly. The difference matters: language problems aren't learning problems.

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Learning problem versus a language problem. When Nicholas was in grade 1, they said he cannot learn anything. When I had him, I had this child who was fascinated by the world. Very slow, always thinking, but fascinated by the world. Nicholas has an auditory processing disorder. Still has it, but he had it much more significantly as a young child. He's worked an enormous amount to get to where he is, but as a 6-year-old, he looked really slow. And the way we judge people is by their language, by their speech, and the speed of speech, and the speed of thought. How quickly does it go into the brain and how quickly does it spit it out? Nicholas was very slow. But he didn't have a learning problem. He had this slow language, slow to take it in, took a long time for it to spin around and then come out in some order that everyone could understand. So he didn't have a learning problem, he had a language problem. And so the learning still goes on in a whole different array of things, through maps, through poetry, and it was very important to use the poetry Because you're giving him the language. It's something that was repetitive. You're finding the rhyming words. You're going with the content, finding the rhyming words, and you're giving him the language he needs to do the learning.