Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Receptive speech delay and dyslexia: help me learn

...more about how it all fits together.
I want to be able to be a supportive friend to a mom who is very worried about her 8 year old second grader.

The kid had a *massive* receptive speech delay which was only caught when he started preschool at turning 3. He was one of (then) 5 in a well run household and was functioning adequately at home, so it was only when he disintegrated in the new setting that they realised that what they thought was minor expressive delay and some regulatory issues was a much bigger problem, wth the kid not understanding a word anybody was saying.

With hard work, he has caught up adequately, though I believe he is stillbelow average speech wise. With a late summer birthday, redshirting was a no brainer, but now that he started second grade and expectations are ratcheting up, it’s becoming clear that, at age 8, he is again quickly falling behind.

His reading is at the first percentile - can string a few sounds together but cannot understand a word. He can’t read a sentence. He is exhausted after writing one. The religious education teacher wanted the class to copy down the Our Father which lead to such a meltdown no one at the school can ignore theproblem any longer, and the conferences and testing machinery has started up again.

Problem is, we live in Europe, and all testing, diagnostics and therapy has to run via the medical system, the school is barely involved, all they have to offer is accomodations such as more time on tests and leninency with grading. They don’t have a reading specialist on site.

So, while all the diagnosticians agree stuff is going on and the kid will need targeted intervention, it’s all on the parents to put it in place, with the mom (who’s had a sixth in the meantime, most impressive mom I know!) responsible for all the schlepping.

At school, the friend feels that rather than support, they (both parents are MDs) are getting the „you just can’t deal with one of your kids not being that bright“ vibe. I do tell her that I have seen her kid play and build and it’s just not true. She tells me she looks at my 8 year old fourth grader reading Harry Potter and feels horrible.

She knows I’m not smug - I have a child with a major physical disability and learning disabilities, and the other ones have their own 2 e issues, that’s not it.Her being an M.D., I’m sure I cant help with diagnostics. I’m just tryng to be supportive and saying the right things, but this level of dyslexia and dysgraphia is something I have no experience with or knowledge f.. Can someone of you experienced 2 e parents help me understand how this works, that a kid has to learn how to understand written language all over again?

As you know, my go-to is always Orton-Gillingham-based remediation programs, such as Wilson, Barton, All About Reading/Spelling, or Logic of English, for reading/spelling delays in English. If it's going to be a challenge to do her own home-based tutoring, or to run around trying to find a qualified provider, she could also try the gamified OG reading/spelling lessons on Nessy (https://www.nessy.com/uk/) (which has the added advantage of having a UK spelling convention option, likely to be more compatible with European schools).

If it's dyslexia in another orthography, the same techniques should work, but identifying an effective intervention will be a little harder, as I'm not familiar with non-English-language offerings. Given his history of receptive language delays, he likely does not have a solid foundation of phonological processing skills; he probably wasn't (and still may be below average in) accurately perceiving speech sounds, which makes it pretty tough to get sound-symbol correspondence.

That suggests another avenue for intervention: it may be that part of this can be tackled through additional speech therapy, to work specifically on phonological processing/phonemic awareness skills, rather than only language. Phonemic awareness, after all, is a major element of the OG reading intervention.

And on another note, it really shouldn't matter whether or not the child is "that bright". Even quite low cognitive individuals can learn to read perfectly effectively (at least with regard to fluent decoding--comprehension is another matter, but that isn't really under discussion in second grade) if taught explicitly and systematically. His reading level is below that of many intellectually-impaired age-peers. So honestly, if the school really feels that way, their expectations are way too low for cognitively-impaired learners. (Not to mention this particular learning disabled child.)

Aeh, thank you so much for taking the time to provide your professional expertise. I do pride myself on umy internet research skills normally, but this one had me stumped, for whatever reason.

Taking a step back and rebuilding his foundation in phonology/phonemic awareness makes total sense. I know they have gone back to his former speech therapist for the initial evaluation and have follow up appointments there, and the clinic has an excellent reputation (tried to get in at the time with my LD kid and couldn’t, they were so overbooked), so they’ve probably got that covered. It’s just the schlep - they won’t go into schools, I know because I’ve tried that at the time, too. Maybe the best support I could offer on that one would be watching the two younger ones, but we will soon be going into hospital ourselves...

I understand that one wouldn’t want to wait with the targeted reading intervention, though. Trying to find an online program he could do in the home is a brilliant idea, I’ll bring it up. You’re right, the language isn’t English, and I have found before that stuff in English tends to be so much better, and more developed, and all around “more”....but at least the language is somewhat more phonetic than English, so there is hope there.

And yes, the schools attitude is deplorable. It’s a rural school within a rural community that’s been swallowed up by a suburb. The (sub-conscious - they *know* the kid had speech issues, they *know* he will end up with a dyslexia dx, they *know* he was fine in math till now) attitude goes like this:
Kid can’t read = kid is stupid.
Kid has meltdowns = kid is a brat.
Mom has questions = parents are in denial.

And, kid will soon run into more and more trouble in maths, because there will be more and more word problems he can’t read = we knew kid was stupid, so there!

Year in, year out I feel confirmed in my decision not to let my kids walk the three minutes round the corner to that school but drive them into the city. They would have withered.

@aeh, just a quick update on the situation. I do pride myself a bit on my guesstimating skills as afar as IQ scores are concerned, and I was sure the kid would score highly on nonverbal skills, putting all worries about this being a “stupid” issue to rest. Testing for this kid is in full swing now and IQ scores (and also a dyslexia diagnosis, so the school’s got the paperwork they need) are in, and the mom told me non verbal scores came in just below the 130 cutoff! Which is in the ballpark I would have predicted...

The verbal scores however were, predictably, a disaster, and they are continuing to practice reading at home (they haven’t found a computer program at his low skill level...) and taking him to the speech therapist to work on his phonemic awareness, while I take his little sister to music class at the time. Still an uphill slough but his mom is just so much more relaxed now that the nonverbal scores have given her confidence in her child’s abilities and future, and her basis for advocacy.

Thanks for the update. Good to hear some supports are in train, and some others potentially on the way.