The authorities should be serious if they want to move towards advocating inclusive education especially for children with learning disabilities.
MANY children with special learning needs require speech and language therapy from an early age. They generally receive this service from speech-language pathologists, either in hospitals or in private practices.
Although the provision of speech-language services in schools is common in most developed countries, this service, unfortunately, has yet to be made available in Malaysian schools.
Therefore, this area of remediation, though crucial, remains inaccessible to many children in need of it.
Developmental and learning disabilities in children are common. Evidence from worldwide reports show that about 16% to 33% of children have at least one form of special learning needs.
McLeod and McKinnon from Charles Sturt University in Australia compared the prevalence of communication disorders with other learning needs in 14,500 primary and secondary school students.
They found that the majority of students with special learning needs are struggling in the area of speech, language and communication.
Their statistics show that 19% of the students have dyslexia, 12% have communication impairment and 6% have difficulties learning English or other languages as their second language.
Altogether, these figures yield an alarming 37% of students with speech, language and communication difficulties.
This figure is compelling, as compared to the other forms of special learning requirements: behavioural/emotional difficulty (6%), early achiever/advanced achiever (6%), physical/medical disability (1%), intellectual disability (1%), hearing impairment (1%) and visual impairment (0.5%).
Besides that, the prevalence of developmental and learning disabilities has been reported as “increasing” over the years. According to an American national report released in a prominent scientific journal, Pediatrics (2011), the prevalence of development disabilities has increased from 12.84% to 15.04% over the past 12 years.
In the past 10 years, Malaysia has also experienced a notable shift in the prevalence for students with special educational needs.
The Special Education Department in the Education Ministry reported that in 1999, there were 6,433 students who received special education services in primary schools and 2,627 students in secondary schools.
by Dr. Low Hui Min.
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