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There are many symptoms of learning disabilities. They become manifest in different combinations in children who suffer from this disorder irrespective of their intelligence, motivation, and hard work for learning. Here are few symptoms to understand if a child has learning issues.
- Difficulties in writing letters, words and phrases, reading out text, and speaking appear quite frequently. Quite often they have listening problems, although they may not have auditory defects. Such children are very different from others in developing learning strategies and plans.
- Learning-disabled children have disorders of attention. They get easily distracted and cannot sustain attention on one point for long. More often than not, attentional deficiency leads to hyperactivity, i.e. they are always moving, doing different things, trying to manipulate things incessantly.
- Poor space orientation and inadequate sense of time are common symptoms. Such children do not get easily oriented to new surroundings and get lost. They lack a sense of time and are late or sometimes too early in their routine work. They also show confusion in direction and misjudge right, left, up and down.
- Learning-disabled children have poor motor coordination and poor manual dexterity. This is evident in their lack of balance, inability to sharpen pencil, handle doorknobs, difficulty in learning to ride a bicycle, etc.
- These children fail to understand and follow oral directions for doing things.
- They misjudge relationships as to which classmates are friendly and which ones are indifferent. They fail to learn and understand body language.
- Learning-disabled children usually show perceptual disorders. These may include visual, auditory, tactual, and kinesthetic mis-perception. They fail to differentiate a call-bell from the ring of the telephone. It is not that they do not have sensory acuity. They simply fail to use it in performance.
- Fairly large number of learning-disabled children have dyslexia. They quite often fail to copy letters and words; for example, they fail to distinguish between b and d, p and q, P and 9, was and saw, unclear and nuclear, etc. They fail to organise verbal materials.
It must be noted that learning disabilities are not incurable. Remedial teaching methods go a long way in helping them to learn and become like other students. Educational psychologists have developed appropriate techniques for correcting most of the symptoms related to learning disabilities.
