PHONIATRICS Learning disability CORRECTED

- Executive Summary

Common red flags for learning disabilities: • Discrepancy between child's ability versus his/her academic achievement. • Phonological awareness problem. • Sound production difficulty. • Syntactic errors. • Word finding difficulty. • Reading comprehension problems(Strong recommendation).

First step in assessment is to exclude other factors that might account for academic underachievement, such as: • Hearing impairment • Visual impairment (uncorrected errors) • Intellectual disabilities • Neurodevelopmental disorders • Environmental factors (e.g. inappropriate educational instruction) • Insufficient motivation (Strong recommendation).

Through psychometric evaluation (IQ assessment), the child is put in one of the following 3 categories: A. Specific learning disability (SLD) (if IQ≥ 85). These children will be subjected to SLD training program. B. Slow learner (if IQ 70-84). These children are candidates for "integration" and should receive same SLD training program except for phonological awareness training. C. Intellectual disability (if IQ < 70). These children need special schools and special education(Strong recommendation).

When the diagnosis of SLD is established, the following assessments should be undertaken: • Assessment of comorbidities: including central auditory processing disorders (CAPD) through special tests, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) through Conner's test. • Assessments to delineate the areas of deficit, such as: Language test, psycholinguistic abilities test, dyslexia test, reading test, phonological awareness (PA) test, dysgraphia disability scale (Strong recommendation).

Management of SLD depends on its type as follows: a) Management of dyslexia includes: • Phonological awareness training. • Phoneme/grapheme correspondence & alphabetic reading therapy. • Automatic decoding therapy. • Interventions for reading comprehension. b) Management of dysgraphia is based on its type whether dyslexic, motoric, or spatial dysgraphia. Management of dyscalculia through specific mathematics strategies (Strong recommendation).