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Is there a \'disability\' for learning foreign languages?
Every educator has seen students struggle to learn a foreign language, even those who may excel in other academic areas.
In recent years, educational researchers in both the foreign-language and learning-disability literature have considered the possibility that a new type of disability exists, the foreign language learning disability (FLLD).
In an article in the Journal of Learning Disabilities, Richard Sparks, who is credited with identifying this disability, disputes the notion that a foreign language learning disability truly exists, stating that the use of the term was premature, and, in retrospect, incorrect.
For many years, Sparks writes, researchers have attempted to explain why some students have problems learning a foreign language and have considered many possible causes such as language aptitude and native language skills or affective variables such as anxiety, motivation and personality.
Parents and advocates for students classified as having learning disabilities (LD) often automatically assume that the students will have difficulty learning a foreign language, Sparks says. He and his colleagues conducted several studies that hypothesized a connection between LDs and difficulties in foreign-language learning but could not find evidence to support it, he says.
Because of the increasingly common usage of the term FLLD (e.g., FL disability, disability for FL learning), I thought that it was time to clarify for the record the position that a disability for learning an FL has not been supported by the research literature, writes Sparks.
Problems with identification
Sparks says he and his colleagues failed to find evidence of FLLD after conducting studies comparing FL performance by students with and without LD and with and without IQ-achievement discrepancies.
Our studies have shown consistently that students classified as having LD enrolled in FL courses do not exhibit cognitive and academic achievement differences (e.g., in reading, writing, vocabulary, spelling) when compared to poor FL learners not classified as having LD, Sparks writes.
First, students classified as having LD do not always exhibit problems with FL learning, he notes. Second, students classified as having LD do not exhibit different learning profiles or more severe FL learning problems when compared to students with FL learning problems not classified as LD.
The term learning disabilities has been used to refer to a loose collection of problems from underachievement to mental retardation, Sparks says. Professionals continue to disagree about how to define and diagnose many LDs, not to mention how best to instruct students with these labels, he adds. The consequence of this disagreement, he says, has been a loss of confidence in knowing that a student diagnosed as having LD really has LD.
The diagnosis of an FLDD is problematic for similar reasons, he says. Proponents of FLLD have suggested several approaches to diagnosis:
Discrepancy between scores on standardized measures of intelligence and achievement;
failing FL courses;
lower grades in FL courses; and
discrepancy between intelligence tests and FL aptitude tests (e.g. the Modern Language Aptitude Test [MLAT])
Sparks says there are serious problems with all of these approaches. IQ tests have not been found to be a robust predictor of FL proficiency, he says. Some researchers have proposed that an IQ-achievement discrepancy and evidence of impairment in the skill area could be used to diagnose a foreign language learning disability. But Sparks says the courts have ruled that there must be evidence of substantial impairment compared to the average person for an LD diagnosis.
He notes that because the average person in the population cannot read, write or comprehend an FL it is difficult to maintain students have a disability. Based on the evidence so far, he adds that an IQ-achievement discrepancy does not seem to delineate a group of students with unique or more severe native language of FL learning difficulties. Withdrawal or poor performance in FL courses also is not a diagnostic tool. First, students withdraw from FL courses for many reasons (e.g. maintain a higher GPA, distaste for subject, etc.). Second, classroom grades may be unreliable and may not accurately assess a student\'s progress in learning the FL.
Problems with MLAT
Since the late 1960s, the MLAT has been the most widely used FL aptitude instrument, Sparks says. To identify an FLLD, proponents have suggested that a discrepancy between IQ and MLAT and a discrepancy between MLAT and native language achievement scores could point to a disability. Sparks points out that IQ tests and the MLAT are both aptitude tests, so an IQ-MLAT discrepancy cannot be used to diagnose a disability for FL learning.
Others have proposed that a low score on the MLAT could be used to point to an FLLD. Not only is use of one test score to diagnose an LD unsound practice, Sparks says, but the norms for the test have not been updated since 1958. There has been an almost threefold increase in the percentage of individuals completing four or more years of college since 1958, he notes.
Sparks concludes that, based on the evidence, there is not a distinct disability that can be called an FLLD. Like Ellis (1985) and Stanovich (1988), I take the position that the proper analogy for FL learning problems is obesity, not measles, and that FLLD can be operationally defined and diagnosed only in an arbitrary manner, Sparks says.
One implication of his research, Sparks says, is that educators should question their policies for course substitutions or waivers from FL requirements with a classification of LD. An LD classification is irrelevant in determining whether a student will exhibit FL learning problems, he says. In my view, he concludes, the focus of native and foreign language educators and researchers should be on developing effective methods for teaching FLs to low-achieving students.
Is there a disability for learning a foreign language? by Richard Sparks, Journal of Learning Disabilities, Volume 39, Number 6, November /December 2006, Pp. 544-557.
Published in ERN January 2007 Volume 20 Number 1
Learning Disabilities and Foreign Language Learning
By: Robin L. Schwarz (1997)
Foreign language study is an increasingly prominent part of education everywhere. Not only are high school students nearly always required to study a foreign language, but many lower and middle schools have added foreign languages to their curricula, whether as an enrichment or a requirement. Foreign language magnet schools have been created in some school districts and seem to be very popular. And of course, it\'s more common than not that colleges and universities require foreign language study for graduation. For the student unencumbered by a learning disability, foreign language study is indeed an enriching and rewarding experience. For the learning disabled student, however, it can be an unbelievably stressful and humiliating experience, the opposite of what is intended.
While it has long been recognized in the learning disabilities field that foreign language study would be a terrific challenge to learning disabled students, somehow this fact has been widely ignored in the field of foreign language instruction and in schools in general until very recently. Teachers of ESL students have also recognized that there are students who have great difficulty mastering English because of learning disabilities. This fact has added some urgency to the need for recognition of this problem. As more research is being done and more teachers are recognizing the problem, more solutions are being created for the student facing the challenge of learning a foreign or second language and the teachers who teach them.
What causes this difficulty?
The field of second language acquisition has historically blamed language learning failure on a number of factors. Anxiety in the foreign language classroom (anxiety about making mistakes in grammar and pronunciation, about understanding the teacher, about remembering vocabulary) has been prominent as a purported cause of the failure. Among other causes cited in the literature have been lack of effort, lack of motivation, poor language learning habits and low ability in language learning. In the late 1960\'s, Dr. Kenneth Dinklage of Harvard University was compelled to find out why some of Harvard\'s brightest and best were not passing their language classes. He quickly dismissed lack of effort, seeing that most of these students were putting other courses and their degrees at major risk by devoting unusual amounts of time and effort to their language classes. Similarly, lack of motivation was not a cause, as these students could not graduate without completion of their language requirement. As for anxiety, he realized that the students were coming to see him because they were suffering from extreme anxiety as a result of not being able to pass their language classes. Since most of these students had never failed a class before, he felt that anxiety had not originally played a part in their failure.
When he interviewed these students, Dinklage found that a number of the failing language students had in fact been diagnosed as learning disabled and had overcome their disability through good tutoring and very hard work; still, the foreign language course had triggered the problems the students thought were behind them. Others in the group, Dinklage found after testing, had previously undiagnosed learning disabilities; again the problems had not shown up until foreign language classes were attempted. The third part of the group, he felt, had a language learning disability, though Dinklage could not find the usual evidence of problems in testing. Clearly these students were unable to be successful in their foreign language study while at the same time they were excellent students in their other classes. He could find no other explanation. Then, in a kind of experiment years ahead of its time, he arranged for a graduate student who had a learning disabled sibling to teach Spanish to some of these struggling Harvard students using methods of instruction known to be helpful to those with learning disabilities. The students taught in this way were mostly able to pass the exams necessary to complete the foreign requirement.
Thus nearly 30 years ago, Dr. Dinklage pinpointed most of the basic ideas and principles relating to foreign languages and learning disabilities: The problem was related to being learning disabled, not to lack of motivation or effort or to anxiety by itself. Anxiety was the result of failure not the cause. Students not previously diagnosed as LD showed up as LD in the foreign language classroom. The learning disability had to be addressed in educational measures taken. Once the LD issues were addressed, the students could learn.
Leonore Ganschow of the University of Miami, Ohio, and Richard Sparks of Mt. St. Joseph\'s College, both college psychologists who had numerous students referred to them because of problems in foreign language classes, began in the 1980\'s to look more closely at Dinklage\'s observations. In their research, they formulated a theory which explained the problems and variations in foreign language acquisition. An extension of earlier research on foreign language acquisition in which language is described as having component parts or linguistic codes, (phonological, semantic and syntactic), Ganschow and Sparks\' Linguistic Coding Deficit Hypothesis (LCDH), states that difficulties with foreign language acquisition stem from deficiencies in one or more of these linguistic codes in the student\'s native language system. These deficiencies result in mild to extreme problems with specific oral and written aspects of language. Their view is that most learners experiencing difficulty with foreign language learning have problems with phonological awareness. That is , they have trouble with the basic sound units of language, phonemes, and do not recognize or otherwise manipulate these basic units of sound efficiently. As a result, the student may have difficulty with the actual perception and production of language necessary for basic comprehension, speaking and spelling, or with language comprehension, which may affect understanding and/or production of language on a broader scale. According to their theory, excellent language learners are strong in all three of the linguistic codes, and conversely, very poor language learners are weak in all three. In between, however, are students who may be quite glib and able to do conversational language, but who have great difficulty with grammar and writing in the new language, or the opposite kind of student who perhaps reads and writes fairly well, but cannot speak with a good accent in the foreign language or cannot understand very much of what is spoken to him or her. These difficulties, the researchers say, spring from deficits in the native language. That these problems may be overt or so subtle as to have been ignored was observed by Dinklage many years ago, and this fact contributes to the difficulty many experts and non-experts have in believing that the problem is in fact based in first language. How can a student be competent, sometimes very competent, in his first language and have difficulties with a new language, difficulties that are supposedly based in the first language? It is hard to accept.
How can learning disabled students be taught foreign languages?
Once they had pinpointed what they felt was the root of the foreign language learning problem, Ganschow and Sparks began investigating ways that learning disabled students could be helped to learn a foreign language. At least two approaches to foreign language instruction different from normal or traditional language instruction have emerged as being effective.
The first and most researched approach is a response to Ganschow and Spark\'s findings that many, if not most, students having trouble with foreign language acquisition have phonological deficits in their first language. Ganschow and Sparks theorized further that to help these students, the sound system of the target language must be very explicitly taught. In order to test this theory, Ganschow and Sparks collaborated with a high school Spanish teacher who had learned about the Orton-Gillingham method of teaching phonology, reading and spelling to very significantly learning disabled students. In this method, sounds are presented in a highly structured fashion with a great deal of visual, kinesthetic and tactile practice and input. The Spanish teacher, Karen Miller, has tested the effectiveness of teaching Spanish to learning disabled students using the Orton-Gillingham approach. The research on her students has shown quite conclusively that LD students taught Spanish in this way have been able to learn and retain it. Another collaborator, Elke Schneider, has had similar results teaching German to LD students.
In their studies on Karen Miller\'s students, Ganschow and Sparks found that by being taught phonological skills in one language, the students improved their phonological awareness in English also. This finding has led to a variation on the method of teaching phonology in the target language: teach the fundamentals of phonology in the student\'s native language before foreign language instruction begins. That is, students are taught to recognize phonemes, to decode, or read words, efficiently and to encode, or apply the sounds to the written language. Basically, they learn what language is and how its sounds and parts function. Application of this knowledge to the language they are trying to learn is the next step. This has proven an effective remediation as well. In fact, so strongly do Ganschow and Sparks believe this, they now recommend very strongly that such phonological skills be much more heavily stressed when children are learning to read. They feel students\' reading and language skills will be much stronger, and future problems with foreign language acquisition will be headed off for many.
The second approach to language instruction which has been effective has been to adapt the foreign language courses according to principles of instruction known to be effective for LD students. This means making such changes as reducing the syllabus to the essential elements, slowing the pace of instruction quite considerably, reducing the vocabulary demand, providing constant review and incorporating as much visual/tactile/kinesthetic (i.e. multisensory) stimulation and support as possible. Many of these course adaptations were also responses to the specific complaints and requests of foreign language students having trouble in their classes. Furthermore, in some schools there are courses designed for the student strong in listening and speaking skills but weak in reading and writing, and vice versa. The University of Colorado at Boulder has shown this latter approach to be effective in Latin and Spanish courses adapted for LD students. A phonological component is part of this adapted curriculum.
What if these instructional conditions can\'t be met?
While it is good news that the underlying cause of problems with foreign language learning has been tentatively identified and that ways have been found to teach LD students foreign language, two major problems remain. The first is that it is relatively rare that a school can, or more importantly, is willing to, devote an entire foreign language section or class to LD students. The second is that finding teachers trained to teach foreign language to LD students is even rarer. Most often in the real world, LD students find themselves in a classroom of so-called normal language learners. In this case, the students must rely on the willingness of the teacher to be inventive and flexible and on the school or school system itself to accommodate the student to the best of its ability and to the requirements of the law. As any LD student and his or her family will tell you, this is rarely a smooth process. It is almost equally painful when a teacher recognizes the needs of a particular student, but does not have the time or resources or support to be able to adequately accommodate that student, except to the degree the law requires.
As with any aspect of learning for any learning disabled student, no single solution is good for everybody. Stories abound of learning disabled students who have learned a foreign language one way or another. The question to be asked however, is what learned means. Students may become highly conversational with excellent accents and still be quite weak in grammar and in written language. Others may be very skilled readers of a foreign language and yet be virtually unable to converse in more than the most rudimentary phrases poorly pronounced. Still others may be fairly competent in all areas but never come close to attaining an accent that is close to native in the foreign language.
Consequently, when a learning disabled student faces foreign language learning, a realistic assessment of the student\'s situation, problems and needs should be done. In other words, what the student may be able to do in a language and what the learning situation offers may not match at all. A student able to do oral language may be in a situation where passing grammar and translation tests is really what is required. Similarly, someone who reads and translates proficiently may be up against a teacher for whom pronunciation and conversation are of great importance. In cases such as these, reasonable accommodation may indeed mean providing a waiver and/or requiring a substitution. Some colleges are very inventive on the substitution issue. Catholic University in Washington, DC requires literature or history courses in cultures that are not based in romance languages. For example, students can study Middle Eastern culture or African or Chinese history or literature. Sometimes sign language is permitted as a substitution, though there is debate about that as a viable alternative to a foreign language.
Policies on waivers from foreign language requirements vary enormously. Every school has its own set of requirements. Some require full documentation of a learning disability with findings pointing to the deficits which are associated with foreign language learning problems; others might require a score on the Modern Language Aptitude Test ( MLAT). Unfortunately for the LD student, many schools, especially colleges, may require evidence of having attempted a foreign language and failed.
The path of the LD student facing a foreign language requirement is made even rougher by the fact that many schools lack personnel who are versed in the problems of foreign language difficulties for learning disabled students. Even prominent universities who boast of their accommodation of learning disabled and other handicapped students may be ignorant of this problem. Certainly, the foreign language departments are even more unaware of its existence. Students and families asking schools for accommodation on this issue need to be well-versed themselves and prepared to provide literature or at least reference to literature that will inform the school of this problem. Even better, when possible, parents or adult students should discuss the problem with a school before enrolling, to be sure that the problem can be dealt with. In one case, an LD student known to have such poor phonological skills that any oral foreign language study was out of the question, worked out an agreement with his school that he would become proficient in the reading of French if the school would accept that for his language requirement. Since he was a European history major and a brilliant student with excellent reasoning and memory skills, this seemed possible. Indeed, in a short time he was reading French texts quite comfortably and was well on his way to a reasonable compromise with his school of choice.
Once again, as with all things associated with learning disabilities, the answers are often complex and long-term, and everyone student\'s problem and solution is likely to be different. What is most important is that the problem of foreign language learning for the learning disabled be recognized for what it is and that the student be fairly and reasonably accommodated. Hopefully, as learning disabilities personnel, foreign language professionals and others become more aware of the research and literature, the path for the LD student facing foreign language requirements will become smoother.
References
References
Click the References link above to hide these references.
Barr, Vickie. Foreign Language Requirements and Students with Learning Disabilities ERIC Digest. 1993. ED355834.
Demuth, K & N. Smith. The Foreign Language Requirement: An Alternative Program. The Foreign Annals 20, i, (1987): 66-77.
Dinklage, Kenneth T. Inability to Learn a Foreign Language in G. Blaine & C. MacArthur
(Eds.) Emotional Problems of the Student. New York, 1971: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Ganschow, Leonore, Richard Sparks & Elke Schneider. Learning a Foreign Language: Challenges for Students with Language Learning Difficulties. Dyslexia (Journal of the British Dyslexia Association) 1, (1995):75-95.
Ganschow, Leonore & Richard Sparks. Effects of Direct Instruction in Spanish Phonology on the Native Language Skills and Foreign Language Aptitude of At-risk foreign Language Learners. Journal of Learning Disabilities 28, (1995): 107-120.
Hill, Barbara, et al. Accommodating the Needs of Students with Severe Language Learning Difficulties in Modified Foreign Language Classes. In G. Grouse, (Ed.), Broadening Frontiers of Language Education. Lincolnwood, IL, 1995: National Textbook Co.
Rooney, Karen J. Dyslexia Revisited: History, Educational Philosophy, and Clinical Assessment Applications. Intervention in School and Clinic 31,i, (1995): 6-15.
Sparks, Richard & Leonore Ganschow. Searching for the Cognitive Locus of Foreign Language Learning Difficulties: Linking first and Second Language Learning. Modern Language Journal 77, ii (1993): 289-302.
Sparks, Richard, & Leonore Ganschow. The Impact of Native Language Learning Problems on Foreign Language Learning: Case Study Illustrations of the Linguistic Coding Deficit Hypothesis. Modern Language Journal 77,i (1993): 58-74.
Vogel, Susan A. & Pamela Adelman. Success for College Students with Learning Disabilities. New York, 1993: Springer Verlag.
Robin L. Schwarz, M.Sp.Ed. Learning Disabilities Language Specialist Learning Skills Program Coordinator The English Language Institute, American University Washington, DC October 1997
When an ELL Has Difficulty Learning, Is the Problem a Disability or the Second-Language Acquisition Process?
By Suzanne Irujo, ELL Outlook™ Contributing Writer
One of the questions that I have most often been asked during my years as a bilingual/ESL teacher educator is how to distinguish between academic difficulties caused by a language or learning disability and academic difficulties caused by lack of proficiency in a second language.
I first grappled with this question early in my career as a third- and fourth-grade bilingual teacher when a child named Ana began her third-grade year in my classroom. She had attended an ESL program in a different district in second grade and a rural school in Puerto Rico in first grade. She could speak fluently in English, although she had a Spanish accent and her speech reflected unacquired grammatical structures and lack of vocabulary. She was virtually a nonreader in both Spanish and English, but that could be explained by her educational history. Since she had already been exposed to reading in Spanish and English, I decided to provide intensive reading instruction in both languages, separated by time of day. By the end of the year, Ana had progressed in English through the pre-primer and primer levels, but had made virtually no progress in Spanish.
When Ana returned for her fourth-grade year, I decided to focus exclusively on English reading. She continued to progress, but at a very slow rate, and I began to wonder about the reasons for this. Were her difficulties in reading due to a learning disability or to lack of proficiency in English? Because there are similarities in behaviors, this question can be a very difficult one to answer. She had articulation problems in reading and speaking English; were they due to a language disorder or to a Spanish accent? She had difficulty processing phonological information; was this a processing problem or a lack of familiarity with the sound system of English? She had trouble remembering vocabulary words; was this poor memory or lack of experience with the English language?
When I discussed Ana\'s case with colleagues, they all urged me to refer her to special education. They said it didn\'t matter what the cause of her problem was; with a special education referral she would get more help. But would it be the kind of help she needed? My colleagues argued that as long as students got some kind of additional help, it didn\'t matter what kind of help it was, or where it cames from. I wasn\'t sure.
The problem is that the kind of support given to students with reading or language disabilities is not the kind of support that second-language learners need. A learning disability has an internal cause; it will not cure itself with time. Students with learning disabilities need to be taught compensatory strategies to help overcome the disability. Lack of second-language proficiency has an external cause; with time and appropriate support, it will cure itself. ELLs need large amounts of meaningful exposure to academic language, in interactive situations, with appropriate scaffolding to help them complete tasks that they can\'t yet complete by themselves. I was afraid that Ana would not get this kind of support in a special education class, where the traditional focus on incremental mastery of discrete sequential skills could prevent her from having to grapple with authentic problem solving using meaningful academic language.
In addition, I was concerned that if Ana were referred to special education, she would be labeled and come to view herself as being stupid or having a disability. She would probably remain in special education for the rest of her school career and might never attain her academic potential. In a paper that addresses the issue of overrepresentation of ELLs in special education, Clara Lee Brown claims that erroneous placement in special education deprives [culturally and linguistically diverse students] of an enriching and challenging curriculum [1, p. 227]. They are then tracked into low-ability programs, often drop out of school, and may spend the rest of their lives in low-paying jobs.
The question of overrepresentation of ELLs in special education classes has been an issue since the 1920s, when newly arrived Mexican immigrants in California were given IQ tests in English and placed into classes for the mentally retarded on the basis of their test scores. A lot has changed since then, and nondiscriminatory testing and classification have been part of federal law since the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (PL 94-142) was passed in 1975. However, the fact that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Amendments of 1997 require states to collect and examine data on overrepresentation of minorities in special education shows that it is still a problem.
At the same time, the opposite problem also exists. ELLs who really do have learning disabilities often do not receive the services they need. Their problems may be unrecognized because they are second-language learners. Or they may be referred to special education but not receive appropriate services because of a lack of bilingual special education teachers.
Distinguishing between incomplete second-language acquisition and a learning disability is a difficult task. From a list of six language processing deficits that can be present in learning-disabled students [2], four of them could be attributed to the second-language learning process: lack of attention, difficulty interpreting verbal messages, difficulty retrieving stored information, and difficulty sequencing and organizing information. The only way a language disability can reliably be distinguished from second-language acquisition is to do a complete assessment in both languages. If problems are apparent only in the second language, it is probably a language acquisition issue; if they are present in both languages, it is a language disability. This solution, however, is not possible with children such as Ana who never acquired a solid foundation of language skills in their native language.
I never did figure out the cause of Ana\'s reading problems. As her fourth-grade year went on and her progress in reading remained slow, I had to decide whether to retain her in fourth grade, send her on to middle school, where she would get much less classroom support than she got in my self-contained classroom, or refer her to special education. I discussed my concerns with a special education teacher, who agreed to come to my classroom to observe Ana. After watching her in small-group English reading instruction, this teacher informed me that Ana was obviously very low functioning and that there was no point in going through a special education referral because she likely had such a low IQ that she would never be able to perform well academically, even with special education services.
This blanket diagnosis, based on a very short observation, no interaction, and no assessment, made me so angry that I decided I wanted nothing to do with the special education program in that district. Ana went on to middle school the following year, reading three years below grade level in English, but unlabeled.
I have since learned that the only way to get fair treatment for ELLs in cases like this is to become an advocate for them. As part of his framework for Empowering Minority Students [3], Jim Cummins recommends an advocacy-oriented approach to assessment, which evaluates the entire societal and educational context within which the child has developed, rather than just testing the child to locate the \'problem\' or \'disability\' (p. 30). The only ways to distinguish a learning disability from lack of proficiency in a second language is through unbiased, thorough assessment in both languages or through alternative assessments when native language assessment is not possible or would not yield valid results. Teachers of ELLs have to demand such assessments and monitor the process from beginning to end.
There are many good sources of information about how to advocate for ELLs who are being considered for special education referral. An ERIC Digest dealing with the overrepresentation issue claims that placement in special education classes may be a form of discrimination [4, p. 1] and describes important stages in the advocacy process: promoting family involvement, making the general education classroom conducive to success for all children, increasing the accuracy of referral and evaluation, providing appropriate special education services, and monitoring the provision of services. Clara Lee Brown coined the term SLAAP (second language acquisition-associated phenomena) to describe the wide range of low to extremely low language performance that is displayed by [culturally and linguistically diverse] students in the process of acquiring English as a second language (ESL), but that could be falsely identified as language disabilities [1, p. 227]. She describes what can be done at the classroom, school, and state levels to reduce over-referrals of these children to special education, and recommends alternative assessment measures.
I don\'t know what happened to Ana. I wish I had done more for her. And I hope that we have progressed enough since then so that all teachers of ELLs can be the kind of advocate I should have been for Ana.
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[1] Brown, C. L. (2004). Reducing the Over-Referral of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students (CLD) for Language Disabilities. NABE Journal of Research and Practice 2 (1): 225-43. http://njrp.tamu.edu/2004/PDFs/Brown.pdf
[2] Levine, M. (1992). Developmental Variations and Learning Disorders. Cambridge, MA: Educators Publishing Service. Cited in Root, C. (1994). A Guide to Learning Disabilities for the ESL Classroom Practitioner. TESL-EJ 1(1): A-4. http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej01/a.4.html
[3] Cummins, J. (1986). Empowering Minority Students: A Framework for Intervention. Harvard Education Review 15: 18-36.
[4] Burnette, J. (1998). Reducing the Disproportionate Representation of Minority Students in Special Education (ERIC/OSEP Digest #E566). Arlington, VA: The ERIC Clearinghouse on Disabilities and Gifted Education. http://ericec.org/digests/e566.html
Every educator has seen students struggle to learn a foreign language, even those who may excel in other academic areas.
In recent years, educational researchers in both the foreign-language and learning-disability literature have considered the possibility that a new type of disability exists, the foreign language learning disability (FLLD).
In an article in the Journal of Learning Disabilities, Richard Sparks, who is credited with identifying this disability, disputes the notion that a foreign language learning disability truly exists, stating that the use of the term was premature, and, in retrospect, incorrect.
For many years, Sparks writes, researchers have attempted to explain why some students have problems learning a foreign language and have considered many possible causes such as language aptitude and native language skills or affective variables such as anxiety, motivation and personality.
Parents and advocates for students classified as having learning disabilities (LD) often automatically assume that the students will have difficulty learning a foreign language, Sparks says. He and his colleagues conducted several studies that hypothesized a connection between LDs and difficulties in foreign-language learning but could not find evidence to support it, he says.
Because of the increasingly common usage of the term FLLD (e.g., FL disability, disability for FL learning), I thought that it was time to clarify for the record the position that a disability for learning an FL has not been supported by the research literature, writes Sparks.
Problems with identification
Sparks says he and his colleagues failed to find evidence of FLLD after conducting studies comparing FL performance by students with and without LD and with and without IQ-achievement discrepancies.
Our studies have shown consistently that students classified as having LD enrolled in FL courses do not exhibit cognitive and academic achievement differences (e.g., in reading, writing, vocabulary, spelling) when compared to poor FL learners not classified as having LD, Sparks writes.
First, students classified as having LD do not always exhibit problems with FL learning, he notes. Second, students classified as having LD do not exhibit different learning profiles or more severe FL learning problems when compared to students with FL learning problems not classified as LD.
The term learning disabilities has been used to refer to a loose collection of problems from underachievement to mental retardation, Sparks says. Professionals continue to disagree about how to define and diagnose many LDs, not to mention how best to instruct students with these labels, he adds. The consequence of this disagreement, he says, has been a loss of confidence in knowing that a student diagnosed as having LD really has LD.
The diagnosis of an FLDD is problematic for similar reasons, he says. Proponents of FLLD have suggested several approaches to diagnosis:
Discrepancy between scores on standardized measures of intelligence and achievement;
failing FL courses;
lower grades in FL courses; and
discrepancy between intelligence tests and FL aptitude tests (e.g. the Modern Language Aptitude Test [MLAT])
Sparks says there are serious problems with all of these approaches. IQ tests have not been found to be a robust predictor of FL proficiency, he says. Some researchers have proposed that an IQ-achievement discrepancy and evidence of impairment in the skill area could be used to diagnose a foreign language learning disability. But Sparks says the courts have ruled that there must be evidence of substantial impairment compared to the average person for an LD diagnosis.
He notes that because the average person in the population cannot read, write or comprehend an FL it is difficult to maintain students have a disability. Based on the evidence so far, he adds that an IQ-achievement discrepancy does not seem to delineate a group of students with unique or more severe native language of FL learning difficulties. Withdrawal or poor performance in FL courses also is not a diagnostic tool. First, students withdraw from FL courses for many reasons (e.g. maintain a higher GPA, distaste for subject, etc.). Second, classroom grades may be unreliable and may not accurately assess a student\'s progress in learning the FL.
Problems with MLAT
Since the late 1960s, the MLAT has been the most widely used FL aptitude instrument, Sparks says. To identify an FLLD, proponents have suggested that a discrepancy between IQ and MLAT and a discrepancy between MLAT and native language achievement scores could point to a disability. Sparks points out that IQ tests and the MLAT are both aptitude tests, so an IQ-MLAT discrepancy cannot be used to diagnose a disability for FL learning.
Others have proposed that a low score on the MLAT could be used to point to an FLLD. Not only is use of one test score to diagnose an LD unsound practice, Sparks says, but the norms for the test have not been updated since 1958. There has been an almost threefold increase in the percentage of individuals completing four or more years of college since 1958, he notes.
Sparks concludes that, based on the evidence, there is not a distinct disability that can be called an FLLD. Like Ellis (1985) and Stanovich (1988), I take the position that the proper analogy for FL learning problems is obesity, not measles, and that FLLD can be operationally defined and diagnosed only in an arbitrary manner, Sparks says.
One implication of his research, Sparks says, is that educators should question their policies for course substitutions or waivers from FL requirements with a classification of LD. An LD classification is irrelevant in determining whether a student will exhibit FL learning problems, he says. In my view, he concludes, the focus of native and foreign language educators and researchers should be on developing effective methods for teaching FLs to low-achieving students.
Is there a disability for learning a foreign language? by Richard Sparks, Journal of Learning Disabilities, Volume 39, Number 6, November /December 2006, Pp. 544-557.
Published in ERN January 2007 Volume 20 Number 1
Learning Disabilities and Foreign Language Learning
By: Robin L. Schwarz (1997)
Foreign language study is an increasingly prominent part of education everywhere. Not only are high school students nearly always required to study a foreign language, but many lower and middle schools have added foreign languages to their curricula, whether as an enrichment or a requirement. Foreign language magnet schools have been created in some school districts and seem to be very popular. And of course, it\'s more common than not that colleges and universities require foreign language study for graduation. For the student unencumbered by a learning disability, foreign language study is indeed an enriching and rewarding experience. For the learning disabled student, however, it can be an unbelievably stressful and humiliating experience, the opposite of what is intended.
While it has long been recognized in the learning disabilities field that foreign language study would be a terrific challenge to learning disabled students, somehow this fact has been widely ignored in the field of foreign language instruction and in schools in general until very recently. Teachers of ESL students have also recognized that there are students who have great difficulty mastering English because of learning disabilities. This fact has added some urgency to the need for recognition of this problem. As more research is being done and more teachers are recognizing the problem, more solutions are being created for the student facing the challenge of learning a foreign or second language and the teachers who teach them.
What causes this difficulty?
The field of second language acquisition has historically blamed language learning failure on a number of factors. Anxiety in the foreign language classroom (anxiety about making mistakes in grammar and pronunciation, about understanding the teacher, about remembering vocabulary) has been prominent as a purported cause of the failure. Among other causes cited in the literature have been lack of effort, lack of motivation, poor language learning habits and low ability in language learning. In the late 1960\'s, Dr. Kenneth Dinklage of Harvard University was compelled to find out why some of Harvard\'s brightest and best were not passing their language classes. He quickly dismissed lack of effort, seeing that most of these students were putting other courses and their degrees at major risk by devoting unusual amounts of time and effort to their language classes. Similarly, lack of motivation was not a cause, as these students could not graduate without completion of their language requirement. As for anxiety, he realized that the students were coming to see him because they were suffering from extreme anxiety as a result of not being able to pass their language classes. Since most of these students had never failed a class before, he felt that anxiety had not originally played a part in their failure.
When he interviewed these students, Dinklage found that a number of the failing language students had in fact been diagnosed as learning disabled and had overcome their disability through good tutoring and very hard work; still, the foreign language course had triggered the problems the students thought were behind them. Others in the group, Dinklage found after testing, had previously undiagnosed learning disabilities; again the problems had not shown up until foreign language classes were attempted. The third part of the group, he felt, had a language learning disability, though Dinklage could not find the usual evidence of problems in testing. Clearly these students were unable to be successful in their foreign language study while at the same time they were excellent students in their other classes. He could find no other explanation. Then, in a kind of experiment years ahead of its time, he arranged for a graduate student who had a learning disabled sibling to teach Spanish to some of these struggling Harvard students using methods of instruction known to be helpful to those with learning disabilities. The students taught in this way were mostly able to pass the exams necessary to complete the foreign requirement.
Thus nearly 30 years ago, Dr. Dinklage pinpointed most of the basic ideas and principles relating to foreign languages and learning disabilities: The problem was related to being learning disabled, not to lack of motivation or effort or to anxiety by itself. Anxiety was the result of failure not the cause. Students not previously diagnosed as LD showed up as LD in the foreign language classroom. The learning disability had to be addressed in educational measures taken. Once the LD issues were addressed, the students could learn.
Leonore Ganschow of the University of Miami, Ohio, and Richard Sparks of Mt. St. Joseph\'s College, both college psychologists who had numerous students referred to them because of problems in foreign language classes, began in the 1980\'s to look more closely at Dinklage\'s observations. In their research, they formulated a theory which explained the problems and variations in foreign language acquisition. An extension of earlier research on foreign language acquisition in which language is described as having component parts or linguistic codes, (phonological, semantic and syntactic), Ganschow and Sparks\' Linguistic Coding Deficit Hypothesis (LCDH), states that difficulties with foreign language acquisition stem from deficiencies in one or more of these linguistic codes in the student\'s native language system. These deficiencies result in mild to extreme problems with specific oral and written aspects of language. Their view is that most learners experiencing difficulty with foreign language learning have problems with phonological awareness. That is , they have trouble with the basic sound units of language, phonemes, and do not recognize or otherwise manipulate these basic units of sound efficiently. As a result, the student may have difficulty with the actual perception and production of language necessary for basic comprehension, speaking and spelling, or with language comprehension, which may affect understanding and/or production of language on a broader scale. According to their theory, excellent language learners are strong in all three of the linguistic codes, and conversely, very poor language learners are weak in all three. In between, however, are students who may be quite glib and able to do conversational language, but who have great difficulty with grammar and writing in the new language, or the opposite kind of student who perhaps reads and writes fairly well, but cannot speak with a good accent in the foreign language or cannot understand very much of what is spoken to him or her. These difficulties, the researchers say, spring from deficits in the native language. That these problems may be overt or so subtle as to have been ignored was observed by Dinklage many years ago, and this fact contributes to the difficulty many experts and non-experts have in believing that the problem is in fact based in first language. How can a student be competent, sometimes very competent, in his first language and have difficulties with a new language, difficulties that are supposedly based in the first language? It is hard to accept.
How can learning disabled students be taught foreign languages?
Once they had pinpointed what they felt was the root of the foreign language learning problem, Ganschow and Sparks began investigating ways that learning disabled students could be helped to learn a foreign language. At least two approaches to foreign language instruction different from normal or traditional language instruction have emerged as being effective.
The first and most researched approach is a response to Ganschow and Spark\'s findings that many, if not most, students having trouble with foreign language acquisition have phonological deficits in their first language. Ganschow and Sparks theorized further that to help these students, the sound system of the target language must be very explicitly taught. In order to test this theory, Ganschow and Sparks collaborated with a high school Spanish teacher who had learned about the Orton-Gillingham method of teaching phonology, reading and spelling to very significantly learning disabled students. In this method, sounds are presented in a highly structured fashion with a great deal of visual, kinesthetic and tactile practice and input. The Spanish teacher, Karen Miller, has tested the effectiveness of teaching Spanish to learning disabled students using the Orton-Gillingham approach. The research on her students has shown quite conclusively that LD students taught Spanish in this way have been able to learn and retain it. Another collaborator, Elke Schneider, has had similar results teaching German to LD students.
In their studies on Karen Miller\'s students, Ganschow and Sparks found that by being taught phonological skills in one language, the students improved their phonological awareness in English also. This finding has led to a variation on the method of teaching phonology in the target language: teach the fundamentals of phonology in the student\'s native language before foreign language instruction begins. That is, students are taught to recognize phonemes, to decode, or read words, efficiently and to encode, or apply the sounds to the written language. Basically, they learn what language is and how its sounds and parts function. Application of this knowledge to the language they are trying to learn is the next step. This has proven an effective remediation as well. In fact, so strongly do Ganschow and Sparks believe this, they now recommend very strongly that such phonological skills be much more heavily stressed when children are learning to read. They feel students\' reading and language skills will be much stronger, and future problems with foreign language acquisition will be headed off for many.
The second approach to language instruction which has been effective has been to adapt the foreign language courses according to principles of instruction known to be effective for LD students. This means making such changes as reducing the syllabus to the essential elements, slowing the pace of instruction quite considerably, reducing the vocabulary demand, providing constant review and incorporating as much visual/tactile/kinesthetic (i.e. multisensory) stimulation and support as possible. Many of these course adaptations were also responses to the specific complaints and requests of foreign language students having trouble in their classes. Furthermore, in some schools there are courses designed for the student strong in listening and speaking skills but weak in reading and writing, and vice versa. The University of Colorado at Boulder has shown this latter approach to be effective in Latin and Spanish courses adapted for LD students. A phonological component is part of this adapted curriculum.
What if these instructional conditions can\'t be met?
While it is good news that the underlying cause of problems with foreign language learning has been tentatively identified and that ways have been found to teach LD students foreign language, two major problems remain. The first is that it is relatively rare that a school can, or more importantly, is willing to, devote an entire foreign language section or class to LD students. The second is that finding teachers trained to teach foreign language to LD students is even rarer. Most often in the real world, LD students find themselves in a classroom of so-called normal language learners. In this case, the students must rely on the willingness of the teacher to be inventive and flexible and on the school or school system itself to accommodate the student to the best of its ability and to the requirements of the law. As any LD student and his or her family will tell you, this is rarely a smooth process. It is almost equally painful when a teacher recognizes the needs of a particular student, but does not have the time or resources or support to be able to adequately accommodate that student, except to the degree the law requires.
As with any aspect of learning for any learning disabled student, no single solution is good for everybody. Stories abound of learning disabled students who have learned a foreign language one way or another. The question to be asked however, is what learned means. Students may become highly conversational with excellent accents and still be quite weak in grammar and in written language. Others may be very skilled readers of a foreign language and yet be virtually unable to converse in more than the most rudimentary phrases poorly pronounced. Still others may be fairly competent in all areas but never come close to attaining an accent that is close to native in the foreign language.
Consequently, when a learning disabled student faces foreign language learning, a realistic assessment of the student\'s situation, problems and needs should be done. In other words, what the student may be able to do in a language and what the learning situation offers may not match at all. A student able to do oral language may be in a situation where passing grammar and translation tests is really what is required. Similarly, someone who reads and translates proficiently may be up against a teacher for whom pronunciation and conversation are of great importance. In cases such as these, reasonable accommodation may indeed mean providing a waiver and/or requiring a substitution. Some colleges are very inventive on the substitution issue. Catholic University in Washington, DC requires literature or history courses in cultures that are not based in romance languages. For example, students can study Middle Eastern culture or African or Chinese history or literature. Sometimes sign language is permitted as a substitution, though there is debate about that as a viable alternative to a foreign language.
Policies on waivers from foreign language requirements vary enormously. Every school has its own set of requirements. Some require full documentation of a learning disability with findings pointing to the deficits which are associated with foreign language learning problems; others might require a score on the Modern Language Aptitude Test ( MLAT). Unfortunately for the LD student, many schools, especially colleges, may require evidence of having attempted a foreign language and failed.
The path of the LD student facing a foreign language requirement is made even rougher by the fact that many schools lack personnel who are versed in the problems of foreign language difficulties for learning disabled students. Even prominent universities who boast of their accommodation of learning disabled and other handicapped students may be ignorant of this problem. Certainly, the foreign language departments are even more unaware of its existence. Students and families asking schools for accommodation on this issue need to be well-versed themselves and prepared to provide literature or at least reference to literature that will inform the school of this problem. Even better, when possible, parents or adult students should discuss the problem with a school before enrolling, to be sure that the problem can be dealt with. In one case, an LD student known to have such poor phonological skills that any oral foreign language study was out of the question, worked out an agreement with his school that he would become proficient in the reading of French if the school would accept that for his language requirement. Since he was a European history major and a brilliant student with excellent reasoning and memory skills, this seemed possible. Indeed, in a short time he was reading French texts quite comfortably and was well on his way to a reasonable compromise with his school of choice.
Once again, as with all things associated with learning disabilities, the answers are often complex and long-term, and everyone student\'s problem and solution is likely to be different. What is most important is that the problem of foreign language learning for the learning disabled be recognized for what it is and that the student be fairly and reasonably accommodated. Hopefully, as learning disabilities personnel, foreign language professionals and others become more aware of the research and literature, the path for the LD student facing foreign language requirements will become smoother.
References
References
Click the References link above to hide these references.
Barr, Vickie. Foreign Language Requirements and Students with Learning Disabilities ERIC Digest. 1993. ED355834.
Demuth, K & N. Smith. The Foreign Language Requirement: An Alternative Program. The Foreign Annals 20, i, (1987): 66-77.
Dinklage, Kenneth T. Inability to Learn a Foreign Language in G. Blaine & C. MacArthur
(Eds.) Emotional Problems of the Student. New York, 1971: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Ganschow, Leonore, Richard Sparks & Elke Schneider. Learning a Foreign Language: Challenges for Students with Language Learning Difficulties. Dyslexia (Journal of the British Dyslexia Association) 1, (1995):75-95.
Ganschow, Leonore & Richard Sparks. Effects of Direct Instruction in Spanish Phonology on the Native Language Skills and Foreign Language Aptitude of At-risk foreign Language Learners. Journal of Learning Disabilities 28, (1995): 107-120.
Hill, Barbara, et al. Accommodating the Needs of Students with Severe Language Learning Difficulties in Modified Foreign Language Classes. In G. Grouse, (Ed.), Broadening Frontiers of Language Education. Lincolnwood, IL, 1995: National Textbook Co.
Rooney, Karen J. Dyslexia Revisited: History, Educational Philosophy, and Clinical Assessment Applications. Intervention in School and Clinic 31,i, (1995): 6-15.
Sparks, Richard & Leonore Ganschow. Searching for the Cognitive Locus of Foreign Language Learning Difficulties: Linking first and Second Language Learning. Modern Language Journal 77, ii (1993): 289-302.
Sparks, Richard, & Leonore Ganschow. The Impact of Native Language Learning Problems on Foreign Language Learning: Case Study Illustrations of the Linguistic Coding Deficit Hypothesis. Modern Language Journal 77,i (1993): 58-74.
Vogel, Susan A. & Pamela Adelman. Success for College Students with Learning Disabilities. New York, 1993: Springer Verlag.
Robin L. Schwarz, M.Sp.Ed. Learning Disabilities Language Specialist Learning Skills Program Coordinator The English Language Institute, American University Washington, DC October 1997
When an ELL Has Difficulty Learning, Is the Problem a Disability or the Second-Language Acquisition Process?
By Suzanne Irujo, ELL Outlook™ Contributing Writer
One of the questions that I have most often been asked during my years as a bilingual/ESL teacher educator is how to distinguish between academic difficulties caused by a language or learning disability and academic difficulties caused by lack of proficiency in a second language.
I first grappled with this question early in my career as a third- and fourth-grade bilingual teacher when a child named Ana began her third-grade year in my classroom. She had attended an ESL program in a different district in second grade and a rural school in Puerto Rico in first grade. She could speak fluently in English, although she had a Spanish accent and her speech reflected unacquired grammatical structures and lack of vocabulary. She was virtually a nonreader in both Spanish and English, but that could be explained by her educational history. Since she had already been exposed to reading in Spanish and English, I decided to provide intensive reading instruction in both languages, separated by time of day. By the end of the year, Ana had progressed in English through the pre-primer and primer levels, but had made virtually no progress in Spanish.
When Ana returned for her fourth-grade year, I decided to focus exclusively on English reading. She continued to progress, but at a very slow rate, and I began to wonder about the reasons for this. Were her difficulties in reading due to a learning disability or to lack of proficiency in English? Because there are similarities in behaviors, this question can be a very difficult one to answer. She had articulation problems in reading and speaking English; were they due to a language disorder or to a Spanish accent? She had difficulty processing phonological information; was this a processing problem or a lack of familiarity with the sound system of English? She had trouble remembering vocabulary words; was this poor memory or lack of experience with the English language?
When I discussed Ana\'s case with colleagues, they all urged me to refer her to special education. They said it didn\'t matter what the cause of her problem was; with a special education referral she would get more help. But would it be the kind of help she needed? My colleagues argued that as long as students got some kind of additional help, it didn\'t matter what kind of help it was, or where it cames from. I wasn\'t sure.
The problem is that the kind of support given to students with reading or language disabilities is not the kind of support that second-language learners need. A learning disability has an internal cause; it will not cure itself with time. Students with learning disabilities need to be taught compensatory strategies to help overcome the disability. Lack of second-language proficiency has an external cause; with time and appropriate support, it will cure itself. ELLs need large amounts of meaningful exposure to academic language, in interactive situations, with appropriate scaffolding to help them complete tasks that they can\'t yet complete by themselves. I was afraid that Ana would not get this kind of support in a special education class, where the traditional focus on incremental mastery of discrete sequential skills could prevent her from having to grapple with authentic problem solving using meaningful academic language.
In addition, I was concerned that if Ana were referred to special education, she would be labeled and come to view herself as being stupid or having a disability. She would probably remain in special education for the rest of her school career and might never attain her academic potential. In a paper that addresses the issue of overrepresentation of ELLs in special education, Clara Lee Brown claims that erroneous placement in special education deprives [culturally and linguistically diverse students] of an enriching and challenging curriculum [1, p. 227]. They are then tracked into low-ability programs, often drop out of school, and may spend the rest of their lives in low-paying jobs.
The question of overrepresentation of ELLs in special education classes has been an issue since the 1920s, when newly arrived Mexican immigrants in California were given IQ tests in English and placed into classes for the mentally retarded on the basis of their test scores. A lot has changed since then, and nondiscriminatory testing and classification have been part of federal law since the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (PL 94-142) was passed in 1975. However, the fact that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Amendments of 1997 require states to collect and examine data on overrepresentation of minorities in special education shows that it is still a problem.
At the same time, the opposite problem also exists. ELLs who really do have learning disabilities often do not receive the services they need. Their problems may be unrecognized because they are second-language learners. Or they may be referred to special education but not receive appropriate services because of a lack of bilingual special education teachers.
Distinguishing between incomplete second-language acquisition and a learning disability is a difficult task. From a list of six language processing deficits that can be present in learning-disabled students [2], four of them could be attributed to the second-language learning process: lack of attention, difficulty interpreting verbal messages, difficulty retrieving stored information, and difficulty sequencing and organizing information. The only way a language disability can reliably be distinguished from second-language acquisition is to do a complete assessment in both languages. If problems are apparent only in the second language, it is probably a language acquisition issue; if they are present in both languages, it is a language disability. This solution, however, is not possible with children such as Ana who never acquired a solid foundation of language skills in their native language.
I never did figure out the cause of Ana\'s reading problems. As her fourth-grade year went on and her progress in reading remained slow, I had to decide whether to retain her in fourth grade, send her on to middle school, where she would get much less classroom support than she got in my self-contained classroom, or refer her to special education. I discussed my concerns with a special education teacher, who agreed to come to my classroom to observe Ana. After watching her in small-group English reading instruction, this teacher informed me that Ana was obviously very low functioning and that there was no point in going through a special education referral because she likely had such a low IQ that she would never be able to perform well academically, even with special education services.
This blanket diagnosis, based on a very short observation, no interaction, and no assessment, made me so angry that I decided I wanted nothing to do with the special education program in that district. Ana went on to middle school the following year, reading three years below grade level in English, but unlabeled.
I have since learned that the only way to get fair treatment for ELLs in cases like this is to become an advocate for them. As part of his framework for Empowering Minority Students [3], Jim Cummins recommends an advocacy-oriented approach to assessment, which evaluates the entire societal and educational context within which the child has developed, rather than just testing the child to locate the \'problem\' or \'disability\' (p. 30). The only ways to distinguish a learning disability from lack of proficiency in a second language is through unbiased, thorough assessment in both languages or through alternative assessments when native language assessment is not possible or would not yield valid results. Teachers of ELLs have to demand such assessments and monitor the process from beginning to end.
There are many good sources of information about how to advocate for ELLs who are being considered for special education referral. An ERIC Digest dealing with the overrepresentation issue claims that placement in special education classes may be a form of discrimination [4, p. 1] and describes important stages in the advocacy process: promoting family involvement, making the general education classroom conducive to success for all children, increasing the accuracy of referral and evaluation, providing appropriate special education services, and monitoring the provision of services. Clara Lee Brown coined the term SLAAP (second language acquisition-associated phenomena) to describe the wide range of low to extremely low language performance that is displayed by [culturally and linguistically diverse] students in the process of acquiring English as a second language (ESL), but that could be falsely identified as language disabilities [1, p. 227]. She describes what can be done at the classroom, school, and state levels to reduce over-referrals of these children to special education, and recommends alternative assessment measures.
I don\'t know what happened to Ana. I wish I had done more for her. And I hope that we have progressed enough since then so that all teachers of ELLs can be the kind of advocate I should have been for Ana.
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[1] Brown, C. L. (2004). Reducing the Over-Referral of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students (CLD) for Language Disabilities. NABE Journal of Research and Practice 2 (1): 225-43. http://njrp.tamu.edu/2004/PDFs/Brown.pdf
[2] Levine, M. (1992). Developmental Variations and Learning Disorders. Cambridge, MA: Educators Publishing Service. Cited in Root, C. (1994). A Guide to Learning Disabilities for the ESL Classroom Practitioner. TESL-EJ 1(1): A-4. http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej01/a.4.html
[3] Cummins, J. (1986). Empowering Minority Students: A Framework for Intervention. Harvard Education Review 15: 18-36.
[4] Burnette, J. (1998). Reducing the Disproportionate Representation of Minority Students in Special Education (ERIC/OSEP Digest #E566). Arlington, VA: The ERIC Clearinghouse on Disabilities and Gifted Education. http://ericec.org/digests/e566.html
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