One of my first initiatives at the tuition center for children with Down’s syndrome was to teach the students, who have already mastered the alphabets, to read in Bahasa Malaysia (BM: the national language of Malaysia). Because BM is a phonetic language, it was relatively easy to teach. With the recommendations from another special education teacher, I bought a beginner systematic BM reading book and started one-on-one reading lessons with three of my students. As with any new initiatives, the students looked rather confused when I started the first few lessons with them.
“b, a, ba” (blur looks)
“k, a, ka” (more blur looks)
Slowly the students began to pick it up.
Khalid was my poster student. He quickly learned to read in BM and he loved to read aloud. So sometimes at the end of the tuition session, I would strategically hand him a storybook and he would be reading aloud when parents came in to pick up their children. The parents were delighted, so was I.
My other students, however, did not progress as quickly. The biggest obstacle that I faced was their speech difficulties as many individuals with Down syndrome have speech and language problems. My students could not articulate some of the sounds correctly, and I did not know how to remediate the problems. When their “ta” sounded like “sa” and vice versa, I wasn’t sure if they made recognition mistakes or they had problems articulating the different sounds. I tried to look for books at the UM library, unfortunately I could not find any books that were helpful.
One of my students, Suresh, was attending speech therapy provided at a government hospital. However, the provision was limited to only one therapy session per month.
Unlike the US, Malaysia does not have strong special education law to provide our children with disabilities the needed individualized special education and related services.
I am doubtful that once a month speech therapy is helpful at all. And his mom was not allowed in the therapy room during the monthly therapy session. I am not sure if the “no parents allowed” was a hospital policy or if it was because Suresh tended to misbehave when his mom was around. Either way, that was unfortunate because if his mom was allowed to observe the sessions, she could continue the therapy exercises at home or even teach me some of the tricks of the speech therapy trade.
In the end, I conceded defeat. The students’ speech difficulties were beyond my expertise. The two students needed intensive speech therapy. I needed a speech language pathologist (SLP) to guide me as to how to best teach my students to read.
What would I do differently now?
I would probably require the parents to ask the SLP if I could consult with him or her regarding my student’s reading problems. Some collaboration between the SLP and the special education teacher would be beneficial for the student.
I should also consider not being held back by the students’ articulation, but push for recognition and comprehension. I would also find ways to assess whether the students recognize and understand the words, even though they may not articulate the word clearly.
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