Accept a diagnoses for a foreign language learning disability to address my poor Spanish grades?

bjkmom
Sun, 08 Mar 2015 11:39:37 +0000

You’re speaking about “opportunities” and what’s “beneficial.”

A diagnosis is a not meant to be a back door to a higher gpa.

Are you implying that every bright kid who has ever worked hard in my class, and attained only a B- average, has a math learning disability?? And that every bright kid in my school of 2500 who has ever worked hard in any subject and attained only a B- average in that subject has a disability in that subject? And that every bright kid in the nation who works hard at anything and attains only a B- in that subject has a learning disability in that subject?

Some kids simply aren’t good at some things. That’s the reality. And it’s always a struggle for A students to realize that there’s a subject in which they have to struggle a bit. A students tend to be very used to being good at everything. They’ve spent their lives hearing how smart they are. When they do come up against a subject that doesn’t come easily, they tend to look for someone or something to blame.

To be honest, as an educator, I have no idea how a learning disability could manifest itself in a foreign language, but not your native tongue. So I did a quick google search, and these are the types of results I came up with:

"Research indicates that LD students and at-risk students both have FL learning difficulties,due to deficiencies in their native languages. "
and
’ "Parents and advocates for students classified as having learning disabilities (LD) often automatically assume that the students will have difficulty learning a foreign language, Sparks says. He and his colleagues conducted several studies that hypothesized a connection between LDs and difficulties in foreign-language learning but could not find evidence to support it, he says.

“Because of the increasingly common usage of the term FLLD (e.g., FL disability, disability for FL learning), I thought that it was time to clarify for the record the position that a disability for learning an FL has not been supported by the research literature,” writes Sparks ’

So my admittedly very quick google search seems to support the idea that there IS a language disability— but your English grades seem to be right there with your other A grades. But that the evidence doesn’t seem to support the idea of a Foreign Language (“FL”) disability, separate from other learning disabilities.