Return-Path: <nifl-esl@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.9.3/8.9.0.Beta5/980425bjb) with SMTP id XAA18342; Fri, 21 Jan 2000 23:53:26 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2000 23:53:26 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <s8888e46.043@nmail.epcc.edu> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-esl@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-esl@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-esl@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: "Andres Muro" <AndresM@epcc.edu> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-esl@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-ESL:3992] Re: ESL and LD screening tools -Reply X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise 5.5.3 Status: OR Robin writes: "The problem with our system is that a legal diagnosis is required to get legal accommodation where accommodation is not willingly offered." I agree with you that we should spend time with people who are learning different to help them improve their communication skills. However, a legal diagnosis may entitle an individual to a legal accomodation, as you state. This legal accomodation is a right that an individual has, and therefore, it should be made avaiable to the person. Weather or not the accomodation is not willingly offered is irrelevant. If an individual has the right to an accomodation, it has to be provided. If a person goes to school in a wheelchair, the school needs to provide a ramp. If a person is deaf , the school needs to provide an interpreter. If a person has a difference that requires an accomodation, such as more time for testing, more light, a bigger room, special tutoring etc, etc, it has to be provided. Andres >>> Rschwar44@aol.com 01/21 10:21 am >>> Kathleen-- what do you mean by "medical diagnsosis??????" Learning disabilities are learning differences that are so exaggerated that they cause problems in some key area of life. They ARE neurologically based, but they are hardly an illness or medical condition. The problem with our system is that a legal diagnosis is required to get legal accommodation where accommodation is not willingly offered. I do not need a legal diagnosis to be forced to give extra time to a student who needs extra time to finish work. I just know that if I don't give the student time, I won't be seeing what the student really can do. There is no mystery or license needed to teach people who learn differently--just a heck of a lot of patience and creativity. The fortunate thing in working with adults is that the adult can become a partner in the process a lot more easily than children. That is, a teacher can sit down with an adult and explain that the usual teaching/learning isn't working, so teacher and student need to figure out how to do it differently. The student can usually, often, give real insight into how she or he learns-- he or she had to have learned things like cooking, taking care of children, buying groceries, even driving, or some other task in life. Whatever it took to learn those skills can be applied to "booklearning" and English. It is important to for programs and teachers to understand that even if a way IS found to get the student the lenghhy and expensive ( $1,000 is the average cost) legal, professionally done diagnosis, the problem of how to teach the student is still there. The diagnostician is going to recommend things such as manipulative/multisensory learning, highly structured, sequenced material, lots of extra work in the area of phonology and phonemic awareness etc. extra time, a lot of oral, or visual, input, repetition etc. Nothing earthshaking. Screening tools are beginning to be developed because everyone would like to know a little faster that a student needs to learn/be taught in a different way and because is too expensive and time-consuming and arbitrary to try to get students legally diagnosed. ( And there a too many students who really ought to be looked at, too) Too often what happens is what we are hearing on the list about students who stay in beginning or intermediate classes for many terms. (I won't go into my tear here about the problem of having arbitrarily segmented terms for language learning.) There have to be a LOT of students in any adult program-- ESL or otherwise- who really don't profit that much from the usual group instruction with the usual materials, so very creative thinking about goals, materials, methods etc will benefit many besides the hard-core LD. The other work I referenced earlier, Do My ESOL STudents Have Learning Disabilties? from the YALD project in MA has a lot of wonderful ideas for using commercially available materials for multisensory learning/teaching. But just think how children learn what they learn and adapt that to adults ( don't use teddy bears and ducklings) and voila! materials are all over the place. Puzzles, board games, sorting tasks ( use cereal boxes and cans) letter tiles, artificial food, real menus, etc etc all can serve a thousand purposes in helping an adult learn. One of the most interesting workshops I' ve ever seen was a series of demonstrations of materials used to teach foreign workers in hospitals the vocabulary they needed to do theif jobs. The demonstrator used felt boards for matching vocabulary to pictures, handmade puzzles to assemble word families, a board with strings and pockets to make practices for words and synomyms or antonymns etc. She strongly rejected arguments that adults shouldn't be insulted with childrens' games-- the adults LOVED the games-- and learning was much more effective. Just an aside that programs like the Wilson system are used for teaching pure decoding and sound discrimination--but are far from sufficient for total reading instruction and other learning. They have no pictures to guarantee that the student will decode purely from letters. Another thing to bear in mind is that learning must be incremental and structured. Diagnostic teaching is what I was taught-- look at what the student doesn't do and figure out what he or she needed to be able to do that, then back up to that. So if a student can't write his or her name, the teacher first needs to be sure the student can't visually discriminate letters, can motorically produce them, can put anything in sequence, understands what those letters represent, can say his or her name and the letters in it and can remember the letters and sequence visually and kinesthetically ( large muscles). If and when the student can do all of those things reliably, he or she should be able to write his or her name successfully. This is what kindergarten and preschool teachers do day in and day out-- help the kids learn skills they will need to do more complex tasks later. Unfortunately, not everyone comes with the neurological skills to do all those things easily, and if the training doesn't happen early on , the weaknesses are there until dealt with--which may not be until the person is an adult. And , as the authors of Links in Learning point out, the foreign adult's life and work in his or her own country may have so heavily focused on one modality ( that is oral versus visual learning and work) that the other never got used at all, so as adults they find that beginning to use a heavily visual ( or oral as in language classes) emphasis is quite a challenge. Anyway-- my bottom line is that learning differences/disabilities aren't such a mystery that a program should shy from tackling the issue. I repeat that the only need for legal, professional diagnosis is for legal accommodation-- such as in standardized tests-- and the student will have to be quite fluent in English to be even remotely accurately tested to obtain that designation. But teaching students in creative ways does not require a diagnosis. Robin Schwarz
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