[senco-forum] dysphasia

Dear All,           
                Sorry about my earlier email - as Ruth noticed, something rather weird happened to it towards the end.
             We have had a French lady in school this week who is training to be a teacher and has come along to see me as her 11yr old daughter has been diagnosed by a French Dr Gilber ( I think I have the name correctly, apparently an expert on Dysphasia) as having dysphasia and hoped I would know all about it! The daughter speaks fluently now, but finds it very difficult to do academic work. She finds it hard to make   what her mother terms an
'academic sentences,'. From what mother says,it seems to me that her difficulties are made worse by the French education system which involves a lot of learning by heart - which takes a lot of time and for 'nothing'according to mum. Mum does a lot of work with her at night -everything takes her so long. She is reading 'Famous Five' type books at the moment. According to Mum the girl is a calm personality but is getting a bit nervous and a bit sad about it. It's difficult for her to understand what she reads, to conceive academic sentences both orally and written; she has real word finding difficulties - can stay stuck without
 help, memorising is a real trouble for her , lot of learning by heart in the French situation.
    Does anyone have any information that I can pass on? Any tips would be particularly helpful. From what she says the French system is very Sp LD unfriendly, her teachers are unlikely/unwilling to tailor any of the learning to her needs, access arrangements are very limited and involve seeing a whole series of professionals in turn. The girl lives and is educated in France it is the mother only who is here for a short while.
      I'm sure there is someone who will be able to point me in the right direction.
  Thanks, in anticipation,
  janet