Difficulty with foreign languages?

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My son is in the process of a formal evaluation for inclusion on the spectrum... he has some sensory processing issues and has some characteristics of AS as well.

Anyway, my son is 7 and in the first grade - he has amazing sight reading skills and is reading at the level of a third-grader. However, he *never* sounds things out, and he is having great difficulty writing because you have to sound out your words before you can figure out which letters to put down. Also, he is a hard-core perfectionist and doesn't want to write down anything but the exact correct spelling - so he gets completely stymied and is unable to even start. The "writing workshop" portion of his day is tortuous for him, but I feel pretty confident that the teachers are handling it well and that they have a good plan for working us through this.

He has also had Spanish 2x week, both in kindergarten and in first grade. In kindergarten, he "hated" Spanish. This year, with a new teacher - he still hates it, but it seems to be causing him even more stress. Maybe expectations of the students are higher? Recently I thought that perhaps this is a symbolic problem related to the whole sight/phonics issue - maybe inability or refusal to sound things out is crippling when you are dealing with a unfamiliar language? Is this something other parents have dealt with? I have read on this board that Aspies can have problems with math or be brilliant at it - I wonder if there is any common wisdom about language issues?

And then - I'm not sure what to do about this, either. We moved my son out of the public schools and into a private school this year in hopes of lowering the sensory load - that has been a great thing. However, we don't have a formal IEP or a school psychologist, etc, at our new school. Any thoughts on what I can do to make this situation more palatable to my son would be greatly appreciated!

BTW, this is my first time posting here, though I have been reading for a month or so. Thank you all so much for all the information. You are a great resource!

I am not good at understanding foreign languages when they are spoken - I have auditory processing disorder. In fact, when people have an accent I can find it harder to understand what they are saying. I took 5 years of French, and I can read it and even speak with a decent accent (I am good at mimicing) but if a French person tried to talk to me I would have an extremely hard time understanding them.

my hubby had trouble learning a language, and also has great difficulty understanding people with accents & also people who are hearing-impaired

I had a hard time learning French as a child, because my mind fought the fact that I wasn't able to literally translate word-for-word English into French and vice versa. That completely freaked me out due to my aspie obsession with "order." The Latin-based languages always felt too imprecise to me for some reason. As an adult, I learned German and did really well. German is related to English, it's phonic so it's easy to spell and pronounce, and it's a very logical language with tons of rules, declensions, etc. so learning it was like putting together a complicated puzzle. You're able to build compound words into infinity, which to me felt like snapping parts of an object together and literally "constructing" words, and it was really satisfying. I loved it learning German, wish I'd taken it in high school and college.

I know German is probably not a practical language for your son to learn at this point, but I'll bet he'd be more likely to connect with it cognitively than with the Latin languages. It's more difficult to learn than French or Spanish, but something about it really appealed to my sense of linguistic logic. Just a thought.

i dont really get the sound problem. but i have a history of myself on learning foreing language. I posted it here somewhere else, there is a post around that talks about learning other languages (i think its in the general autism discussion, and a lot of people have expressed their experiences there about this).

As i posted there, I had problems with learning English (as my second language, my native is spanish) when i was about the age of your son. I guess each mind is a universe, but this is my experience: the english teachers adviced my mother to take me out of the bilingual school because i didn't understand anything of english at all, and it was true. My mother refused to do it, and then something happened (maybe a new teacher i dunno really), i began to understand english very well. It's weird, it's like I had a mental block or something. After that I knew English so well that I was the best of my generation for years. Hell, i have even given English classes in my adult life.

As i said, each mind is a universe, this might not be the case with your child. The question here is how much can you pressure him to keep trying without causing harm to him? It's hard to tell, specially when you say that his problems are mostly with "sounding". I hope this helps in some way.

My son actually learned another language before he spoke English. At that time, he used to say, "No English!" and get really bent out of shape when people spoke English around him.

Now he is the opposite. He doesn't want to hear any other languages except for English. This started when he started school. I am not sure why, but he definitely has some auditory sensitivities plus a lot of OCD like behaviors. He gets stuck on one language and that is it.

But all the people in my family in the US who I think are aspies can all speak 2 languages. My son understands 2, but he insists on using only 1. Don't know what that's all about.

Oh, also, I met another parent while in one of the thearpists waiting rooms who also had a bilingual ASD son, and she dropped the first language completely when she realized that her son was having speech problems. She said that she was afraid that he was getting confused. I haven't totally dropped it. I'm hoping that at some point he will find it interesting and take it up again.

I've had a very hard time with foreign languages. I'm trying to remedy the situation as it relates to the Hebrew language by using a book that contains all of the grammar in about 20 pages with many nice charts. I haven't started on it yet though.

Normally when language is taught it seems like there's a focus on a little piece of the language at a time and the structure is ignored. Learning a lot of vocabulary and only the most basic sentence structures doesn't work well for me. I need to be able to organize the words somehow to make better sense of them. As Hebrew goes the roots are very simple and applied in different predictable patterns to change their meaning, so learning those predictable patterns and many of the roots themselves (rather than focusing on the words formed by combining the two) will likely work better for me.

My best posts are lost to cyberspace, this is a repost.

Foreign language is a "love it or hate it" subject for everyone. There could be a plethora of reasons why your son dislikes his Spanish class. The majority of kids hated Spanish (this is mostly NTs) because the Spanish Teacher is crazy.
Crazy Spanish Teachers have crazy Spanish rooms, I don't know if your son goes to a different room? There could be sensory overload from the decor; flags, brightly colored clothing, signs, mobiles, travel posters. Also, Crazy Spanish Teachers include cultural values in their lessons and outdated music. Some of them dance.
The subject may be not his thing, but then it could be. Perhaps the interactive element-including standing up and "pretending" or acting-is too daunting. Try tutoring at home with vocabulary words to see if he does better with the book in a more calm environment.

For reasons unknown to me, people seem to be predisposed to certain language groups. I'm very fond of the Romantic languages and do well in those classes, but I didn't last two days in a German class. I have friends (Aspie and NT) that are the exact opposite.

I would be more concerned that he doesn't have an IEP and that private schools aren't required to comply with special ed law.

My son's first language is english, although he's also heard spanish most of his life. In addition, because he has speech delays, I decided to have him take speech therapy in english. With that said, it seems that he doesn't speak either very well, however, he picks up both of them just as fast from videos, songs, etc... There are quite a few pretty decent DVDs out there for spanish with lots of pictures/songs, etc...Maybe you can try that since he is so young anyway, and see if that allows him to be more open or pick it up quicker.

My first language is spanish, but I picked up english amazingly quick when we moved to the states and I was in 3rd grade. To this day, I speak both...my sister, who is not AS/HFA (I'm a self-diagnosed, so take that as you wish...hmmm), actually speak both without any accent at all...my son seems to do exactly the same. He even says some french words from some movies he's seen without any accent at all. He does have hearing sensitivities, has perfect picth, which may be the reason he learns every single word with exactly the same accent as he heard it. It's kind of funny actually, because he heard the word "shark" in a movie with an "English" accent, and has always said that specific word with an english accent...Right now, although we speak mostly english to him, his speech therapy is in english, most of his books, videos, etc...are in english, he is in love with a couple of spanish DVDs I bought for him with songs, etc...and has learned many words/phrases exactly as they are pronounced.

Anyway, if it's any help, there's a website called www.spanishtoys.com, it has many educational toys in spanish, including music and DVDs...I have ordered from them before and did not have a problem. Also, he's had a V-SMILE for a couple of years and learned all the numbers, letters, names of animals/fruits/vegetables, etc...from that game, as they have cartridges in both spanish and english.

Good luck!

Thanks, everyone! Your responses has given me a lot to think about, particularly the auditory processing aspect... and I will definitely check out the link to the Spanish toys. Like it or not, he is going to have to get used to the idea - he's in for at least five more years of Spanish, 2x week. I guess we will have to think more imaginatively about how to help him make sense of it. Thanks again!!

^That's a really good point. Keep in mind that whatever AS-related communication problems he has in English (poor listening comprehension, turn-taking, etc.) will still be there in Spanish, too! So you and the teacher will have to differentiate between what's an AS communication problem versus what's a specific problem he's having in actually learning the language. I know that my German listening comprehension isn't nearly as strong as my speaking, reading and writing. I also have the same problems with smalltalk and turn-taking that I do in English. So that adds an extra complication.