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Q
My eight-year-old daughter is in the third grade. She has been getting resource room and speech since second grade. She does her best work one-on-one. She's very well-behaved and ready to do her work in class and at home, but she has a difficult time with reading. I found out this year that she has CAPD. She's getting support in and out of school. On the advice of an audiologist, I asked the school to provide her with an FM unit and speech pathology services. Would an inclusion class help?
A
It's good that you've gotten a definitive diagnosis. Knowing that your child has a Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD) will allow you and your daughter's teachers to find out more about specific ways to help her. The FM unit (which means that she's wearing a small receiver and an earphone) will help your daughter focus more on the sound of the teacher's voice (since the teacher is wearing a microphone that "broadcasts" directly into her receiver). This will help the auditory receptive parts of her brain isolate messages and make better sense of them.

The services of a speech pathologist are very important, especially if that professional has a good understanding of CAPD. We might assume that a speech and language pathologist (SLP) would know about this condition, but audiologists are most familiar with it and use the special equipment necessary to diagnose it. The SLP can not only work with your daughter, but more importantly, provide consultation to the classroom teacher about how to communicate with her so that she can understand spoken language more effectively.

This is especially true if you are considering an "inclusion class." If you are referring to a class that is made up of kids with and without special needs -- and it's a good inclusion class -- then we'd expect that there would many specialists serving the kids and the teacher. This might be the very best environment for your daughter, especially if it's a quiet class and if the teacher can control her voice, the noise level, and the auditory distractions in the classroom. That's a lot of ifs -- so you can see why it's so important to have an SLP on board to help with these important issues.

You mention that your daughter has . Since CAPD is regarded as a type of learning disability that affects auditory processing, it's likely that your little girl had difficulty learning phonetically. This means that she has trouble knowing the sounds that letters and letter combinations make. Some intervention programs claim to "retrain" the listening centers of the brain to allow a child to process phonemes better. Ask the audiologist or the SLP if he thinks one of these programs would be appropriate for your daughter.

For children with poor auditory-processing skills, visually oriented approaches are often helpful. Teachers focus on the development of "sight" words -- some 300 words that children see and read (without sounding them out) so many times that they become automatic. These short words constitute a large percentage of everything we read. If these are mastered, they help kids get through a great deal of print materials that we encounter on a daily basis. Sight words also form the core of longer, multi-syllabic words and their mastery increases the chances for reading success -- especially in a person who has difficulty learning letter sounds.

Learning the shape of words (what's called using configuration clues) also helps. For example, the word "happening" is different from other words because the first letter goes up over the word, the two Ps have sticks that go down, and the last letter hangs down below the line. A teacher (or the child) can trace an outline around the word, and then the child is asked to pick which of two printed words fits in the resulting space.

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