Language development is a gradual process that starts early in human life. Even before birth, the fetus starts to identify the speech patterns and sounds of its mother’s voice and distinguish them from other sounds after birth. There are two early development language stages in humans: receptive language and expressive language. Before developing expressive or verbal language, children usually develop receptive language, i.e. the internal understanding and processing of language. This slowly develops expressive language in them. The children learn to express the same proverbial means that they already expressed through words. The phase of language development in children is not the same. They do not process information at the same rate. Those children are labelled as slow learners. It is not a disorder, and children or adults called slow learners do not necessarily require special education. They are likely to need some extra help and time to learn at an average rate.
Causes Of Slow Learning
Slow learning can be influenced by a number of factors. Some of the factors that cause slow learning in language development are as follows:
Emotional Development
At the early stages of child development, they develop the feeling of love, fear and trust, and when they grow older, he/she develops the feeling of relationship, pride and friendship. In this stage, the changes are very rapid, and every change impacts their behaviour. Therefore, having a positive feeling about themselves helps develop positive emotional and social development. A neglected child builds negative emotions and eventually stops trusting parents and other people. It affects the developing skills of the child, such as socializing, and can lag behind in language development. Their performance can be affected in other areas at school as well.
Environment
The environment around the child is comprised of two components. First, the environment at home and second, the environment they experience in school. Children’s cognitive abilities are nurtured in the learning environment provided by parents and teachers in the form of simple interactive activities. Lack of these interactive activities can slow down the learning process in children.
Personal Factors
The cause of slow learning can be personal factors such as absence from school and illness. When children got absent from school and lack behind in studies, same goes for the language especially the child is learning a new language, absentees can cause a setback. Learning a language is a continuous process and requires constant effort and attention without gaps.
In today’s educational system, schools offer a foreign language as a required course in the curriculum so that students can interact in a foreign language, both in written and oral form. Learning a new language is challenging because of the different alphabets, grammar, and sound systems. It is particularly hard for slow learners to learn thousands of new words. Slow learners are not the same as mentally retarded ones. They can also achieve reasonable academic success based on their rate of learning. As an adult, a slow learner typically becomes socially adjusted, self-supporting and independent, but with the right form of regular classroom program which best suits his/her learning capabilities.
Language educators have to deal with slow learners at some point. Students’ learning capabilities are measured on the basis of how well or poorly they are performing in subjects. Students normally show interest in the subject they like and show carelessness towards other subjects. For slow learners, the secondary school curriculum is extremely hard to cope with without real-life or practical activities. They can achieve success in their academic career by proceeding at a slower pace with an adoptable syllabus to suit their abilities. They have short attention spans and poor memory, which keep them from going for higher studies despite all the educational facilities and guidance. They cannot concentrate on one topic for long and yet cannot keep the same pace as the average children.
Slow learners face difficulty with reasoning skills, and it is harder for them to grasp new concepts easily. New concepts are usually based on the previously mastered concept, and when the class has already mastered a concept and moving on to the second, the slow learners fall behind as they require more time. This led to a knowledge gap and disturbed effective listening and speaking, resulting in limited vocabulary development. This can damage slow learners’ self-confidence and cause anxiety and low self-esteem, which may lead to quick give-up.
