Stumped

Hello everyone, I'm an English teacher at an elementary school in Korea, where I teach the lowest level students, many of them having some learning disorder. Having been through Asperger's myself I can usually come up with good ways to teach them. However one student has me completely stumped.

Let me describe him, as I have no idea what if any diagnosis he's had. I'm sorry if this is long but I don't want to leave anything out that might be important.

He's a very good natured 4th grader, always smiling happy child with no care in the world about how poorly he is doing in all of his classes. He's rather small and thin for his age.

He seems to be severely dyslexic, with no ability to associated written typed, felt or otherwise letters with their sound. He does have some phonemic awareness and can 6 times out of ten match the beginning letter sound to another word beginning with teh same sound, using a computer flash game, but not with flashcards or oral practice.

In any other phonics activities (choosing out of four letters which makes the sound 'nnnn') he blindly guesses. When guessing to me, he does so with completel hopefulness and a big smile on his face then cheers if it's right. If it's wrong he moves onto the next letter in the list with equal entusiasm.

He has VERY little short term memory. Given a LOT of practice he can retain vocabulary words in his long term memory, but cannot retain information about words, letters, or sentence structure.

I hav elearned that he has just as much trouble in all of his other classes, and though he can read the korean language (which is entirely simple syllable-based) he has trouble with the rare, unusual letter combinations that sometimes appear in the language.

He is happy to sit in class for forty minutes avoiding work and never complains of boredom.

He is esepecially avoidant if his only classmate does better on a particular activity. If her skill is greater he immediately shuts downa nd refuses to do anything.

He loves to participate in games, despite the fact that he never really gets any answers right except by pure chance. It doesn't stop him from thoroughly enjoying himself.

I'v ebeen seeing some improvment since starting him on flash games I've found on the internet. He enjoys playing them and shows much better results (ie. He can put the alphabet in order more easily, recognize sounds more easily, etc). At the moment he can spell words decently providing the pool of letters does not exceed one vowel and 4 consonants.

If he doesn't understand something he holds his head down in his hands and moans quietly - the 'my brain is full response'

So my questions are thus:
1. Any insights into his problem? I recognize the dyslexia, but I can't help thinking there is something else going on with the short term memory problems and the happy, outgoing nature
2. Any suggestions on real programs out there (preferable computer based since he really loves to do activities on the computer) that I can use? THe flash games are very limited and I'm running out of them!
3. Any other methods that might be suitable? (please refer me to specificbooks or websites that could be helpful).

I know he's only one single student, but I hav ethe chance to really help him since there are only two students in the class, making it a lot easier to give him the attention he needs.

Thank you!

Tara

I've tried several approaches:

1. Dolch words - a few at a time then made into simple repetitive readers with pictures replacing non-Dolch words. It seemed to work until it was evident he was merely remembering the four-6 line 'stories' and non reading them. When I started making reader that were less repetitive he couldn't follow them

2. Syllabic approach - starting with the letters a,b,c I made sheets with lines like ba ba ba ca ca ca. He could read the simplest of lines only, but once two more consonants were added he could not read the lines without adding the korean letters as reference

3. Whole word sight words - repeated showing of the pictures couples with the written word. Playing a concentration gam with the pictures and words to test his knowledge showed no memory of the words. Actually he has no memory of the cards, and will choose the same cards several times in a row even though they are wrong.

4. Creating the alphabet in order on a felt board. I take all the letters off and have him put them back one. He can do certain strings by himself, but some letters - notably J, N, H he cannot recognize. If I name any of those letters (or some others) he cannot point them out. Letters are also different colors. If I narrow down the pool to a single color he can do a little better in finding the given letter, but most of the time he still guesses randomly in hopes of getting it right.

5. Phonemic awareness sheets: pictures of different objects which I name and he has to tell me if it starts with the given letter or not. He generally calls out yes or no randomly. With help from the korean supervisor he can be talked into thinking about the sound and relate it to the korean letter. At this point he will get most of them right, but 5 minutes later cannot remember that the letter is associated with the korean letter, and cannot repeat the activity with accuracy.

THings he CAN do:
1. Match uppercase and lower case letters on computer flash games
2. About 60% accuracy matching a given word with another word starting with the same sound. (The game he uses involves listening to one word, then listening to six other words and choosing which one starts with the same sound).

I don't think APD is the problem, as he seems to do better on purely listening tasks then any tasks involving letters.

[Modified by: Qof on December 05, 2007 05:21 PM]

Hi Tara,
I've just been investigating the Korean writing system, where part of the problem might be with our inferior English writing system?
Though I was wondering if perhaps you could try the learning Korean writing approach?
Where you shift the focus away from the alphabet, and letters, to syllables?
As the western use of letters, is an unfamiliar concept.
I also noted that the Korean approach, is more concerned with learning morphemes than phonemes.
Along with suffixes and prefixes.

So that basically, it is presented a more familiar way, that has a relationship with his native language?

Geoff,

Ah one more thing - he has sensitive hearing does that ring any bells? He reacts strongly when I put the volume at normal levels, and immediately turns it down to barely perceptible levels

Just a note: I downloaded the demo for Phonics tutor and tried it out on the three worst students (the above mentioned one, one autistic, one dyslexic) - and all three are showing progress. If anyone else is looking for stuff you might want to check that it.

As for the listening program I will look into it. I already did some research on a place in the UK that does work with sound therapy with good results and would be interested in finding something home based.

Thanks for all of your help!