TIPS FOR TEACHERS
The teacher is often the first person to identify signs of auditory processing difficulties. The following checklist may be helpful to assist with identification and referral to a speech and language therapist.
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
This is by no means a diagnostic checklist , but rather a way to assist teachers with when to refer for possible auditory processing difficulties.
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