Admittedly, our fees are comparable to those of lawyers and Chartered Accountants — we are an exclusive consultancy service catering to a very sophisticated clientele. These clients are looking for service that is beyond “standard” Orton-Gillingham tutoring, and they are definitely not part of the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) crowd. Our clients are usually busy business people or professionals who appreciate the value of expertise and are willing to pay for it. After all, these folks became successful by doing what they do best, and in the same way that they are well-rewarded financially, they understand that they have to pay for professional expertise and high-quality service.

That said, I have to say that my greatest reward is not from my fees; it is from the children who are transformed by our work with them!

Last October, I sent one of our clients’ children (with both reading and arithmetic disability from an ESL background) to the psychologist — a gentleman whom I blogged about earlier because he is an icon in our field, one who is marked by high professional standards and integrity. The Ed-Psyche report that came back was not good. I have never seen such low scores. The term used to describe our client’s child was “slow learner.” Very discouraging indeed!

What followed after the official Ed-Psyche report was a great deal of work: observation sessions, designing intervention, recruiting tutors, training tutors, managing the client-tutor relationship, going to the school for meetings, and very intense monitoring and reviewing to ensure a high level of “seamless” service delivery. Of course, from time to time, we also had to deal with the psycho-emotional aspects of the child’s struggle; it is not unusual for LD children to exhibit problematic behavior. With a “damaged” self-esteem from being a chronic low achiever in school, LD children often resort to very unhealthy coping mechanisms in order to “survive.”

Fast-forward to a year later. I am happy to report that our “slow learner” who didn’t have friends now has self-confidence, popularity amongs peers, and good grades (all As and Bs with the exceptions of a C in English and a C+ in Science). The parents of the child are thrilled, of course, and they are very appreciative. But my greatest reward came in the form of a “thank you” note.

Let me tell you the significance of this “thank you” note. For someone with a reading/writing disability, writing a note is equivalent to, well, going to the dentist to have one’s tooth extracted. This child had painstakingly written a note to thank me! I was so overcome with joy that I was walking on air the rest of the day. See the “thank you” note? I am so proud and happy for this child.

Because of cases like this one, I want to emphasize that when we look at a child’s Ed-Psyche report, we should always keep in mind the words of our psychologist who assessed this child: he wrote, “the overall results of this assessment should be seen as only providing an estimate of the child’s intellectual abilities at this point in time. His/Her true intellectual abilities may be higher.”

The socially inept “slow learner” of last year is today’s athletic, popular, and successful student!

The message we want to get across is simply this: LD children do not necessarily have to be in a special school where all the students have LD. With proper support, they can do very well in a regular school setting. The school-based team, working together with an intermediary special education service such as us, can produce some very encouraging results.

Summer is a good time to jump-start LD intervention. Teachers should encourage parents to take advantage of this time to help their children move ahead!

We are having Tea & Talk @ Hycroft for Chinese-speaking parents on May 26^th, 2010. Chinese-speaking parents who find it hard to access special education services due to language barriers should make it a priority to attend this event!

Email us @: events@Learn2ManageLD.com to RSVP.

Dr. Winnifred Tang & Associates Learning Management Inc. is organizing a talk for Chinese-speaking parents which will take place on Wednesday, May 26^th, 2010, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Hycroft, home of The University Womens’ Club of Vancouver. There will be a tea reception afterwards so parents will have a chance to chat with all of us from the office of Dr. Winnifred Tang.

Tea & Talk @ Hycroft for Chinese-Speaking parents is intended to be a cozy and leisurely event. We want parents to feel comfortable talking to us about their children’s learning problems. The beautiful setting at Hycroft, hopefully, will help us to achieve this purpose!

Interested parents should contact us as soon as possible to avoid disappointment. All the information is on the flyer.

We have opened an account at HSBC specifically for Tea & Talk @ Hycroft. Parents can go to HSBC directly and make a payment for their tickets. Before they do so, they should email us at events@Learn2ManageLD.com to ensure that the seats are still available. We will send out the HSBC account information upon confirming seat availability.

The registration procedures were designed to reduce unnecessary paper work and communication. We hope you will find this method of registering simple and convenient.

See you at Tea & Talk @ Hycroft on May 26^th at 7:00 p.m.!

My hope is that through this free workshop sponsored by S.U.C.C.E.S.S., non-English speaking Chinese parents can now breathe a sigh of relief and come to realize that they are not alone. Dyslexia is one of the most common learning disabilities plaguing school-age children who are learning to read. Help is just around the corner. Dyslexia can be managed successfully and it is possible for dyslexic children to learn to read with proper instruction.

See you at the workshop! And don’t forget to register.

As I listened to the parents, the academics, and the various stakeholders speak excitedly about the prospect of implementing early bilingual Mandarin learning in the Greater Vancouver area, I cannot help thinking about the assessment infrastructure that has to be in place for such a venture to work. We know that in the general population, 15-20% of the people will have some degree of a language-based learning disability. If that be the case, those involved in planning for an early Mandarin bi-lingual program should be prepared to deal with the 15-20% of the young children with some sort of a language-based learning disability who will be enrolled in the program. Early screening should be implemented to flag those children who are at-risk for having a language-based learning disability. If early identification and intervention is practiced, then the at-risk children will be better able to take advantage of a Mandarin bi-lingual learning opportunity.

In recent years, the study of reading difficulties in Chinese, Chinese dyslexia, is progressing in exciting ways. Researchers are attempting to understand the role of auditory and visual processing in Chinese dyslexia.

To me, learning a written language will always involve the ears and the eyes. This is why Kavanagh and Mattingly’s classic, Language by Ear and by Eye, is so valuable for us who are language teachers and researchers in the area of reading acquisition in children, no matter what language.

As a researcher, I find the prospect of having a large sample of bi-lingual children to study very exciting. I remember that a few years back, my paper on reading acquisition in Chinese was accepted initially for publication and then afterwards rejected based on one of the reviewer’s concern about the relatively small sample that I had in the study. If there is a critical mass of local children studying the Chinese written language and the English written language, then researchers should be able to have a convincing “n” for the purpose of publication.

One of my hopes is to be able to develop a relatively reliable and simple-to-use instrument for screening children who will likely develop reading problems in both English and Chinese. Predictors of English reading acquisition do exist and it is a matter of time that we will identify some fairly stable predictors for Chinese reading acquisition as well. Already, we have scholars such as McBride-Chang and Ho making significant progress in finding predictors of English and Chinese reading amongst Chinese children.

We live in an exciting time and Greater Vancouver is the place to be if you want to study Mandarin bi-lingual children.

Betty Kosel, VSB ESL Consultant and Dr. Winnifred Tang at the Kirin for a “working lunch” in the fall of 2007

Last year, I accepted an invitation from Betty Kosel, ESL Consultant at the Vancouver School Board, to give the keynote address for the ESL teacher’s section on their Teacher’s Professional Development Day. The planning was done in October of 2007 and the talk was in February 2008. You can see us, Betty and I, in the photograph at the right, enjoying a “dim sum” lunch at Kirin Restaurant while discussing details of the presentation.

It was a pleasure for me to host lunch for the occasion. Betty shared with me the joys and challenges of being ESL teachers in Vancouver. Vancouver teachers work very hard and we need to give them all the support we can. Each year, I accept one or two speaking engagements, which I do for free as a way of giving back to society. I was an ESL student many years ago when I came here as an immigrant child who had just finished grade 4 in Hong Kong. Without the help of my teacher, Mrs. Blackmore, who took an interest in the ESL children in her class, I would have been one grade behind from the other Canadian children my age. Thanks to my kind and resourceful teacher, I was able to catch up to the grade I should have been in and as a result my learning experience in Canada was a positive one. Mrs. Blackmore was able to spend extra time with me because she had the support of the school; we need class sizes that are manageable. Teachers cannot do what is needed for their students to help them succeed if the class sizes are too impossibly large!

These beautiful flowers were presented to me after the talk in February around the time of Chinese New Year. What a burst of colors!

One of the big concerns that had emerged amongst ESL teachers in Vancouver is that of diagnosing ESL students with learning disabilities. That is, when a student has been in Canada for a few years and still lags behind in English language, is it possible that this student is not just experiencing the average second language acquisition challenges but is in fact suffering from a language-based learning disability such as dyslexia? My talk for the Teachers’ Professional Development Day keynote address spoke to that issue and I am sharing my slides for the talk with you here: vsb-pro-d-day_-feb-2008. Notes capturing the main focus of my talk is available in the form of a wiki at http://vsbtangfeb08.wikispaces.com/

Enjoy!