<p>I can't find the forum for LD's but have a question for all of you smart people out there....</p>
<p>Is there an LD that prevents/makes it difficult for a student to learn foreign languages? and is it tied to any math disability?</p>
<p>My daughter is really struggling in Spanish; this is regular, non-honors plain vanilla Spanish...it is not taught as a vocab based program, but rather like "whole language".......</p>
<p>and if there is another place for this thread, moderators, please move.....</p>
<p>I don’t know if there is an official disability (nowadays, probably there is) but certainly not untypical that some kids have particular difficulty with foreign languages (just as some kids have particular talent for them). An excellent student I an very familiar with could never do well in Spanish in high school and ended up dropping it. It was his only weakness, he ended up being admitted to Duke and Williams among others, so you can see he was otherwise a very smart kid…</p>
<p>It is a processing disability I believe. I know three kids who were waived from the school’s language requirement, but had to take classes in global cultures etc or take American sign language thru the state accredited university</p>
<p>Actually, in many cases, it’s students who excel in math who struggle with foreign language. I’ve never heard of difficulty with one being linked to difficulty in the other.</p>
<p>My cousin’s daughter was exempt from the high school foreign language requirement because of a language processing problem (and speech services). However, this did NOT carry over into college. She ended up taking Sign Language at her college in order to satisfy the college’s foreign language requirement.</p>
It has been my experience that math students are the best at picking up some of the more complex languages like Egyptian and Akkadian that require the learning of a new script as well as language.</p>
<p>Whether this holds true for languages like French and Spanish, I have no idea.</p>
<p>I had trouble with a foreign language also (I took Spanish my freshman year of HS, and then switched to Latin). I could memorize vocabulary and conjugate and write sentences, but in speech I couldn’t ever put two words together correctly. Whenever we had a speech test I’d fail (though that accounted for very little of our grade). Though I actually use the wrong verb tenses and pronouns frequently in English, so it’s probably more of a speech deficiency than a foreign language deficiency. </p>
<p>Anyway, since Latin isn’t spoken, it’s all writing, that was easier for me. If she needs a foreign language to go to college and doesn’t really care about Spanish, that might be a better option.</p>
<p>I was a mostly straight-A student in school, though I struggled horribly in German for three years. It was the only class in high school I ever actually studied for, but it would never help out. The teacher sent home a form I had to get signed by my parents to show I had been practicing with them. We did flash cards every night, and I could just never get it.</p>
<p>Good at math, struggled with language in high school. My parents sent me off to France for a gap year, where I finally learned the French I should have learned in high school. It seemed like a light bulb went on. I took German in college and while I would say I had to study harder than average, I did well in German and eventually (after another immersions experience) learned to speak it fluently. I could learn vocabulary, I just couldn’t seem to remember to put all the grammar rules together. </p>
<p>My sister-in-law got excused from the language requirement in college after they determined she had an LD. She made it through high school Latin by not making trouble.</p>
<p>My S struggled with h.s. Spanish, had to work extra hard to get a mediocre grade.
In college, decided he liked some things about the German culture(after a family vacation there) and thought he’d try the language.
He is doing it, doing it well, and studies about the same amount as any other class. He says the difference for him is having an interest in it and wanting to learn.</p>
<p>She may have a learning disability, or she may just be struggling with Spanish. Has she tried tutors, study groups, flashcards? Have you met with her Spanish teacher? </p>
<p>As for math again, it might be a learning disability, it might be that she’s just not great at math. Have you talked to her teacher, do they think she’s in the appropriate level of math class? Do they have any recommendations for her progress (is she getting the concepts but not able to do the test questions? She may need more practice. Is she just not getting the concepts? Bigger problem). </p>
<p>These probably sound like dumb questions, but sometimes asking simple questions prevents overdiagnosis.</p>
<p>There are several disabilities that affect the ability to acquire a foreign language, but none are tied to math. However, I have dyscalculia and struggle SEVERELY in foreign language and strongly suspect the two are related-- perhaps not intrinsically, but the way foreign languages are taught. We are taught to create sentences essentially after memorizing formulas for putting them together, something dyscalculics struggle with, and you also have to be able to remember sequences, something else dyscalculics don’t do well. I also have problems in Spanish related to he spacial orientation issues from dyscalculia (I can’t tell time in Spanish because I can’t tell time at all, I know the words for left/right/under/above/etc but can’t tell the concepts apart, i mix up whether pronouns go to the left of or to the right of the verb, etc and so forth just like how I mix up left/right in math). I am an excellent reader in Spanish and am a fair listener if allowed to lip read (auditory processing issues), but writing is extremely difficult for me for these reasons, which translates into issues with speaking, as well. All I can say is do not go to Michigan, they don’t care what kind of disabilities you have and you cannot complete the gen ed language requirement pass/fail.</p>
<p>DD has processing disabilities that affect both math and languages. She has accommodations from the university but since her major requires she take languages she did not try to exempt them. She does have extra time on tests and she cannot take the tests in the regular computer format, she has to have the paper version so she can block out extraneous information and focus. She has more forgiveness on spelling too I believe. Still, her languages did bring her GPA down since it was still hard to get an A even with accommodations.</p>