“My Name is Seepeetza” is a book written as a compilation of journal entries of a girl in a residential school. Her journal recounts her thoughts and feelings in an almost nonchalant manner as she talks about being persecuted for being Aboriginal, bullied for having blue eyes, and the alienation resulting in both. She speaks warmly of her memories at home, expressing a deep desire to return exemplified by her loneliness at the school.
Learning Disabilities is a relatively new field, filled with complications, unproven theories, and the need for more research. It is difficult to accurately identify the tenants of what constitutes a learning disability beyond that of a difficulty, As mentioned in Identifying English Language Learners with Learning Disabilities, “attempts to validate cut-points have met with a resounding lack of success giving the impression that cut-points reflect arbitrary choices that serve to control prevalence rates and/or access to resources.” (Wagner, Francis, & Morris, 2005) Quite simply, how can you diagnose anyone with LD, let alone ELL students, when there is no standard, definitive, empirical list of benchmarks or lack thereof that constitutes a sound diagnosis? How does this affect diagnosing English Language Learners (ELL) properly with a Learning Disability (LD) versus the disadvantage of not knowing the language sufficiently to progress along with their native speaking English peers?
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AuthorPDP @ SFU Archives
April 2013
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