Hi Robin.
It's wonderful to gain your insight here. I'm looking forward to
hearing your thoughts on the LD/ESOL connections.

In my work, I've seen
a plateau effect in native-English speaking low-literacy learners we discussed
about a year ago on this board. We captured a lot of that on the ALE Wiki
and explored some of the rationale. Many confirmed that for some reason the
NSE (native speakers of English) learners get stuck at a second or third grade
level and don't get past that point to become true readers, winding up in
decoding-ville with minimal comprehension.

I'd suspect that learning disabilities
play in here too. Some of what I've found in my research on metacognition
and the NSE low-literacy learners implicates the learners' concepts about
reading and I think that's a factor too. You mentioned your Navaho contact
not having a word for learning disabilities. I wonder if some of the ESOL
learners have trouble with the conceptualization of the reading process too.
We work with a population of recently immigrated older Liberian women with
no schooling at all, and find that there are so many assumptions in American
culture that they have no concept of. 

I wonder if the conceptualization
of the reading process has some implications for your populations too.

Jean Marrapodi
Providence Assembly of God Learning Center