Nonverbal learning disorder involves difficulty understanding nonverbal cues. Students with this condition tend to have higher verbal and receptive language abilities, but problems with social, motor and visual-spatial skills. As a result, the student has difficulty recognizing and understanding body language, tone of voice, facial expressions and other forms of nonverbal communication.
It is often difficult to diagnose nonverbal learning disorder, because it is accompanied by stronger verbal and receptive language abilities. The disorder is usually diagnosed during middle school, when learning shifts toward increasingly frequent and complex written expression, reading comprehension and the use of graphs, charts, geometry, and maps.
Symptoms
Difficulty recognizing and understanding facial expressions, body language, tone of voice and other nonverbal cues.
Challenges with tasks that require fine motor skills such as drawing, writing and even buttoning a shirt.
Poor psycho-motor coordination, leading to bumping into people and perceived “clumsiness.”
Challenges generalizing information after it’s learned, and following multi-step procedures.
Trouble adjusting to routing changes and transitions.
Experience of an "illusion of competence" because the child has higher, well-functioning verbal learning skills.
Difficulties with figurative or idiomatic language.
Repetition of activities, for example asking too many questions, which may sometimes disrupt classes.
Tutoring
As with other learning challenges, nonverbal learning disability has no cure but can be well-managed, with coordinated help from parents, family, friends, teachers, colleagues, and others.
Some ways to help a child with nonverbal learning disability include:
- Encouraging more verbal communication
- Breaking down, and explaining in detail, abstract concepts, metaphors, idioms, and nuances
- Minimizing the number of transitions and changes in routine
- Understanding that generalization of ideas or instructions—understanding that a specific idea can apply more generally as well--cannot be assumed
Explicitly answering questions, when possible
- Limiting the number of activities when the student feels overloaded
- Encouraging creative programming
- Providing verbal explanations when an individual is confused
- Preparing students in advance with verbal communication before any changes are implemented
Ensuring that the individual has mastered the foundations of math, reading, and writing—skills that sometimes may not be automatic
Our learning specialists, academic tutors, and writing coaches provide 1:1, individualized tutoring for children, adolescents, college students and adults of all ages, levels, and personalities. Our goal is to help students and adults feel more confident and become more effective learners and workers overall. We aim for students to maximize their learning potential from a collaborative approach working with parents, teachers, and other professionals.
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- Each of Themba’s expert tutors has an advanced degree in working with learning differences or an academic field of expertise. All tutors have years of teaching and tutoring in private and public schools or universities.
- We customize curricula, starting with careful assessments, then applying developmentally appropriate methods and strategies. The student's current academic material is an important focus, but strengthening core skills is crucial because that will last a lifetime. We coach students to learn how to organize, plan, prioritize, focus, avoid distraction, and keep track of materials and tasks.
- Goals include improving memory and information retention, spending more focused time on tasks and completing them, decreasing procrastination, organizing schoolwork, managing time more effectively, and learning to think carefully before acting. Specialists model and support the application of skills in the appropriate context. They put the student in the driver s seat to best generalize these skills without holding the steering wheel.
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