TIPS FOR TEACHERS
The following difficulties may present in the classroom if a child has auditory processing difficulties. If a child presents with difficulties in more than 3 to 4 of these items, referral to a speech & language therapist may be indicated for further assessment.
1) Following Instructions
- Copies other children
- Starts before you’ve finished giving the instruction
- Asks for repetition (often)
- Takes time to get going after instructions have been given
- Completes part of the instruction
- Inaccurate completion of instructions
- May appear to have “selective hearing”
2) Speech
- Imprecise or “slushy” speech
- Articulation errors
- Difficulty saying multisyllabic words
3) Reading
- Guesses at the word from the first letter
- Guesses at words from surrounding text/pictures
- Difficulty decoding novel words
- Phoneme (sound) – Grapheme (letter) confusion
- Difficulty decoding multisyllabic words e.g. rubbish-bin
- Blending of syllables or phonemes
- Fluency is poor
- Decodes word by word and then struggles to get meaning
- Poor attention to punctuation
- Difficulty recalling what has been read
4) Spelling
- Vowel confusion – particularly i/e
- Long and short vowel confusion
- Difficulty with vowel digraphs (ee ea oa etc.)
- Difficulty learning word families
- Analysis – syllables or phonemes
- Poor generalization of spelling rules to unfamiliar words
- Forgets previously learned spelling
- Sequencing errors
- Difficulty with blends
- Phoneme – Grapheme confusion
- Weak syllable omission e.g. tephone/telephone
- Difficulty using punctuation
Thanks for the great blog, I’ll forward it on to teachers and parents.
Thanks Margaret
Please feel free to send suggestions for future posts.
Nikki