Many learning disabilities may go unnoticed in ESL students. Photo by Darien Library, Flickr
The difficulties inherent in language acquisition and in adjusting to a new culture may overshadow an underlying learning disability in ESL high school students.
According to Winnifred Tang, who has a PhD in special education and offers diagnosis and treatment to students with a learning disability at Dr. Winnifred Tang & Associates Learning Management, the symptoms of an undiagnosed learning disability are often misattributed to causes such as poor cultural adjustment, poor motivation and the failure to speak English in social and family settings.
“The student’s struggle with the English language is simply taken as a second-language acquisition problem and not a language-based learning disability,” says Tang.
Two common academic learning disabilities are dyslexia, a language-based disability, and dyscalculia, which is number based. Students with dyslexia easily mix up letters when writing and display poor word retrieval when speaking. However, misspelling words and failing to come up with proper vocabulary are characteristic of anyone’s journey on the road to learning a new language. With these commonalities, it’s easy to see why the learning disabilities of ESL students are mistakenly attributed to the difficulties inherent in language acquisition.
To Mike Whittingham, vice-principal at J.N. Burnett Secondary School for the past two years, this issue is nothing new. He agrees that ESL students who also have a language-based learning disability are more difficult to diagnose.
“[Diagnosing] can be a challenging thing to do from the start, and when you put in the language component, the process becomes more complex,” says Whittingham.
He explains that the language barrier – in combination with limited insight into a student’s previous education – compounds the problems in diagnosing ESL students with learning disabilities.
“In the last few years in Richmond we are seeing more students entering the school system who have had little previous contact with the English language,” he says of his four years of experience as an administrator in the Richmond public school system.
At Burnett, he calculates that 21 per cent of students are ESL, and 6 to 8 per cent of students are learning disabled. He considers that roughly 1 to 3 per cent of Burnett students are both ESL and learning disabled. These numbers are similar in Vancouver. According to the Vancouver School Board, in the 2012/2013 school year, there are 23,056 students enrolled in Vancouver secondary schools. Of this number, 7.7 per cent of the student population is ESL, and 6.1 per cent have a diagnosed learning disability.
How can parents identify a learning disability in their secondary school student? Tang explains that at different developmental stages there are different manifestations. Among high school students, behaviour such as low self-esteem, a lack of interest in reading or poor time management may surface in an attempt to mask learning frustrations. Academically, a student may show messy handwriting, slow reading skills, poor reading comprehension and the inability to correctly record facts.
“The student is often tongue-tied and takes a long time to respond to questions and may be reluctant to speak up,” says Tang.
Whittingham explains that currently there is no program built specifically to deal with this problem in the Lower Mainland public school system, although he says meetings and research are in progress to create a positive change for future students facing these challenges.
“If a parent thinks their student has a learning disability prior to entering a new school, they should share this information with the ESL teacher and counsellor. If noticed after the fact, the parent can meet with the ESL teacher, counsellor and administrator who can help relay information and make adjustments,” he advises.
Until this gap in the Lower Mainland secondary education system is resolved, Whittingham says, “The problem rests with pinpointing what the learning issue might be and dealing with that.”
