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Any child wrestling with the task of learning a new language will experience difficulties along the way, and among the skills a successful TESOL instructor should master will be those of acknowledging the difficulties, encouraging the child to overcome them, and guiding him or her through the process of doing so. Nevertheless, the child’s difficulties can be greatly compounded – and the instructor’s likelihood of success, greatly diminished – if the child is handicapped not just by a lack of familiarity with the language but also by a bona fide learning disability. Such a situation will not necessarily be easy to discern. If the learning environment is one in which the instructor is dealing with a number of students sharing similar cultural backgrounds, the contrast between the problematic student’s progress and that of his or her peers will be a red flag, of course. In a one-on-one instructional setting, however, sorting out whether the difficulties are relatively normal or whether the child’s efforts are being undermined by a learning disability can prove somewhat daunting. A particular difficulty can be rooted in very different causes. Take, for example, a student who seems chronically to be unable to follow directions. Does he or she simply lack the language proficiency to comprehend the directions given? If so, then the problem will ultimately take care of itself as the student’s language skills improve, however gradually. Does the problem lay in part with the instructor, in that he or she Is failing to provide clear directives, demonstrating and clarifying on an ongoing basis? In this circumstance, the focus should be on developing the TESOL teacher’s skills, rather than on those of the student. Yet, what if the student’s difficulties stem from limitations in memory, or limitations in his or her ability to mentally process an entire set of instructions without pause and/or repetition? The types of intervention, the tools that would be appropriate to help the student address, mitigate and (hopefully) overcome these limitations are going to be much different from those normally expected from even a highly qualified TESOL classroom instructor. This is not to say that the type of situation just described would obviate the need for or the appropriateness of the instructor’s well developed TESOL approaches and procedures. The purpose of those approaches and procedures is to facilitate the child’s learning of English; that purpose and the need for those TESOL approaches and procedures remain the same regardless of whether or not the child’s efforts are being hindered by one or more learning disabilities. The point is, however, that those standard TESOL approaches and procedures might constructively be modified and/or augmented to alleviate the impact of the learning disabilities, if the learning disabilities can be recognized and diagnosed. The goal remains the same – i.e., successful English language learning -- but the learning disabled child’s progress in achieving that goal will thereby be greatly facilitated. At least part of the moral to all this would be to encourage training and familiarization of TESOL teachers with learning disabilities in general, with their impact on language learning processes in particular, and with various instructional methodologies and interventions that can serve to mitigate
