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How to successfully include foreign language learners with dyslexia in the English language
classroom?
Joanna NijakowskaDepartment of Pragmatics, Institute of English Studies,
University of Łódź, Poland
DysTEFL2 Conference, Łódź, Poland, 25 June 2016
• EFL teachers report that they lack sufficient understanding of the nature of dyslexia, the difficulties it causes in foreign language learning.
• More often than not this results from the lack of adequate and sufficient training on how to deal with dyslexia/specific learning differences.
(Nijakowska 2014; 2015a, 2015b, 2015c; Nijakowska & Kormos 2016)
Inclusive practices in teaching FL to students with dyslexia
Developing good practice in EFLteacher training on dyslexia
Inclusive foreign language education for learners with dyslexia and improved European EFL teacher training schemes in this respect have been the leading themes of the DysTEFL (2011-2013) and DysTEFL2 (2014-2016) projects.
• Inclusive practices aim at promoting equality in access to high quality language education and supportive learning environment, at removing barriers to learning and eliminating prejudice and discrimination.
Inclusive practices in teaching FL to students with dyslexia
• Exclusion from foreign language education frequently results from poor awareness of teachers of inclusive practices that can help transform mainstream language education so that it meets the needs of all learners.
Inclusive practices in teaching FL to students with dyslexia
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
• Teachers’ beliefs, knowledge and skills concerning inclusion strongly influence their eagerness and ability to employ inclusive practices in their classrooms (Sharma, Forlin, & Loreman, 2008).
• While many teachers may report positive attitudes towards the idea of including all learners in mainstream classes, they tend to express considerable doubt and concern regarding their preparedness and limited training with regard to implementing inclusive instruction (Beacham & Rouse, 2012).
Inclusive practices in teaching FL to students with dyslexia
• Teacher knowledge, teacher classroom practices and student achievement are tightly linked.
• Studies on teacher knowledge (e.g. Brady et al., 2009; McCutchen &
Berninger, 1999; McCutchen et al., 2002a, 2002b; McCutchen, Green, Abbott, & Sanders, 2009; Podhajski,
Mather, Nathan, & Sammons, 2009) confirm the leading role that initial teacher training schemes and continuing professional development programs play in modifying the instructional potential of teachers and shaping the way they teach.
Inclusive practices in teaching FL to students with dyslexia
• This in turn leads to facilitating student achievements via the use of appropriate instructional and classroom management practices.
Inclusive practices in teaching FL to students with dyslexia
Inclusion• Inclusion means that schools ensure that they
meet the diverse needs of ALL learners.
• In inclusive educational settings all students have access to and can fully participate in all educational activities – the system is flexible enough to recognise and to meet the needs of ALL learners
• In inclusive education individual learning difference is an asset not an obstacle to learning.
• Inclusion is an ongoing process
Inclusive practice?
• Do you think that students in this school share their teacher’s perception of fairness?
• Can they demonstrate their skills and potential while performing this task?
• Can you see any analogy to your educational context?
• Have you ever felt the way any of the animals or the teacher in the picture may feel?
Inclusive practice? Accommodating individual learning differences?
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
• Mutual respect among all class members and a teacher
• Appreciation and acknowledgement of what others can do, their talents, skills and knowledge
• Understanding of what they find more challenging and difficult
Inclusive practice. Accommodating individual learning differences.
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
• Noting that these difficulties are not caused or created by themselves but occur due to a different cognitive profile
• In order to promote understanding of such difficulties, both classmates and teachers may try to complete an experiential task that replicates the challenges faced by dyslexic learners
Inclusive practice. Accommodating individual learning differences.
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
A dyslexic child's account of trying to copy an assignment from the board
‘If she [the teacher] writes lots of things [on the board] I get all the things mixed up because I can only write one thing [word] down each time…. It’s hard to find where I was [on the board], so I just write down as much as I can, which means it’s all over the place and in the wrong order, and I miss bits out.’
‘I thought the numbers she wrote were for the unit [not the pages], so I did the wrong homework – and it was a really hard one! That’s because I didn’t have time to write down everything, so I just wrote down the numbers because I thought they were the most important bit.’
(Adapted from: http://www.dyslexia-parent.com/mag42.html)
• Learners with dyslexia struggle with processing information quickly
• They experience short-term memory problems – this means they may be unable to store information long enough to process it slowly
• This is why they tend to miss out or mix some information
• Reading and spelling pose great challenge because they involve the knowledge of sound-letter relations
• Rewriting involves finding the right place in the text, reading a word, remembering the sequence of letters in a word, writing it down, finding the right place on the board again…
A dyslexic child's account of trying to copy an assignment from the board
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
Handout or virtual learning
environment or virtual space
(cloud/OneNote/Librus) for sharing
information would do the job
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
The aim of this task is to replicate the physical and cognitive challenges foreign language learners with dyslexia might face during rewriting from the board.
Experiential learning task -Awareness raising
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
Awareness raising taskInstructions to the task:
• Take some paper and pick up a pen or a pencil in the hand you don’t normally write with.
• If you are writing with a black pen, say „black.” If you are using a blue pen, stand up.
• I’m going to show you a short text in Hungarian.
• I will give you 2 minutes to copy it BUT for every “a” write “+”, for every “i” write “=“ and for every “e” write “?”
• Make sure you check your work when you finish.
A diszlexia egy specifikus tanulási
zavar, ami öröklődik. Minden tizedik
embernek olvasási nehézségei vannak.
+ d=szl?x=+ ?gy sp?c=f=kus t+nul+s=
z+v+r, +m= öröklőd=k. M=nd?n t=z?d=k
?mb?rn?k olv+s+s= n?h?zs?g?= v+nn+k
How did you feel doing the task?• Did you feel frustrated?
• Were you overwhelmed with the number of instructions?
• Did you find the instructions too complex and odd?
• Did you find it difficult to remember the instructions?
• Did you want to give up as early as possible?
• Was it hard to concentrate on so many things at the same time?
• Were you able to check whether your work was correct?
Which of the following strategies did you employ to accomplish the task?
1) trying to keep up and concentrating hard
2) working really slowly and carefully but not
completing the task
3) copying from a neighbour when you felt you
started falling behind
4) writing the text out normally then going back
and making the changes needed
5) giving up because the task just seemed too hard
InclusionDifferentiation
Accommodation
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
Children with dyslexia can benefit from the typeof schooling available to the majority of childrenthrough a set of educational arrangements, whichadapt the system towards their needs andabilities
Accommodating individual learning differences
Accommodations are the adjustments which should be introduced into the teaching process so that individual learning needs of students with dyslexia are appropriately recognized and met.
Accommodating individual learning differences
Accommodating individual learning differences
• Accommodations should not provide unfair advantage but make it possible for learners with dyslexia to prove their knowledge and skills despite the difficulties they encounter
• Accommodations involve differentiation
• To be fair to all learners, it is necessary to treat them all differently, rather than all the same
• Differentiation is a framework or philosophy for effective teaching that involves providing different students with different avenues to learning in terms of acquiring content; processing, constructing, or making sense of ideas; and developing teaching materials and assessment measures so that all students within a classroom can learn effectively, regardless of differences in ability.
Differentiation
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
Differentiation
1) Simplify instruction
2) Present a small amount of work at a time
3) Reduce copying by including information or activities on
handouts or worksheets
4) Use assignment substitutions or adjustments
5) Provide additional practice and revision opportunities
6) Use flexible work times
7) Change response mode
8) Use explicit and multi-sensory teaching procedures
Simple strategies can make learning more accessible for all students
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
Read the following instruction. How can it be simplified?
This exercise will show how well you can locate conjunctions. Read each sentence. Look for the conjunctions. When you locate a conjunction, find it in the list of conjunctions under each sentence. Then circle the number of your answer in the answer column.
Simplified instruction might say:
Read each sentence and circle all conjunctions.
Simplify instruction
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
• Ask the student to complete only odd-numbered items in a given exercise (put the stars by these items).
• Provide responses to several items and ask the student to complete the rest.
• Divide a worksheet into sections and instruct the student to do a specific section only (a worksheet can divided easily by drawing lines across it and writing „go” and „stop” within each section).
Present a small amount of work at a time
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
• Ask the whole class to read a text and then summarise it,
• but give slower readers a shorter, less complex text, and the quicker workers a longer one.
• They can then share with each other what they have read about.
Ask everybody to work on the same task but with different materials
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
Ask everybody to work on a different task with the same or different materials
• Ask everybody to work on different tasks.
• Give students different bits of a larger task.
• Set a task with a core component that everybody must tackle, and some additional work that the quick finishers can look at while the others are still working.
Make sure that your students with dyslexia:
• can identify phonological units of different sizes –words, syllables, onsets, rimes, and finally, individual sounds,
• learn how to break apart and put these units together to form words. These abilities form the basis for the successful mapping of the sounds to the appropriate letters – spelling.
Use explicit teaching proceduresDirectly teach/develop phonological and
orthographic awareness
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
• Make oral activities more concrete and the word sound structure easier to understand through visual and auditory cues such as tokens, boxes, markers, counters, pictures, gestures, clapping, and tapping to represent words, syllables, onsets, rimes or individual sounds.
• Teach how sounds correspond to letters.
• Teach spelling rules.
Use explicit teaching proceduresDirectly teach/develop phonological and
orthographic awareness
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
Dividing words into sounds
Use explicit teaching proceduresDirectly develop orthographic awareness and teach
spelling skills
• teach syllable analysis through onsets and rimes and present words in sets classified according to therimes they share (e.g. cat, hat, rat, bat),
• use multi-sensory techniques and teaching aids: colour-coding, flash cards, cards for reading and tracing drills, spelling choice stickers, graphic models of words, word slides and flip cards,
Dividing words into onsets and rimes
• combine multi-sensory techniques and direct teaching of productive spelling patterns and spelling rules, especially with regard to sounds that have several possible spelling choices (e.g. train, say, place or might, try, time),
• provide ample practice and repetition opportunities in order to consolidate spelling (e.g. games).
Use explicit teaching proceduresDirectly develop orthographic awareness and teach
spelling skills
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
Spelling choices for individual sounds
Spelling choices for individual sounds
Morphological awareness training
• Derivational morphemes have a power to derive (create) new words, either by changing the original word’s meaning (e.g. ‘un-‘ added to ‘happy’) or its part of speech (e.g. ‘-ness’ added to ‘quick’),
• Inflectional morphemes do not form new words but change the existing ones by refining and giving extra information (e.g. ‘-s’ added to ‘cat’).
Students use cards and movable devices with words and morphemes to form word families
educateeducationeducated
uneducatededucatingeducatoreducatorseducational
employemployed
unemployedemployment
unemploymentemployeeemployer
freshrefreshrefreshments
freshlyfreshmanfreshness
refresher
• Following detailed European EFL teachers’ needs analysis, we designed training materials and piloted them extensively among teachers and we used their feedback to improve the materials
• We offered a flexible training course and materials in different modes of delivery –incorporated by several institutions of higher education in their teacher training programmes
Developing good practice in EFLteacher training on dyslexia
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
DysTEFL2 Course structure and content
• DysTEFL2 course takes a task-based approach to teacher development.
• The course is built on the model of the teacher as a reflective practitioner, who experiments with new learner-centred teaching methodologies, creatively adapts teaching methods, tasks and techniques to his/her context and then reflects on the outcomes of the learning and teaching processes.
DysTEFL2 Course structure and content
The trainer is neither a model nor a source of information, but a moderator and facilitator who helps to raise the trainees’ awareness of the relevant issues, gives possible answers to questions and provides feedback on trainees’ ideas as well as comments and suggestions on the work they produced.
DysTEFL2 Course structure and contentEach unit follows a pattern of the reflective cycle
• face-to-face version -coursebook(trainee’s, trainer’s, test booklets and CD); downloadable files (DysTEFL2 project’s website)
Face-to-faceDysTEFL2 course
• Online version
• Materials, tasks, quizzes and certificates
Online self-studyDysTEFL2 course
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
Moodle DysTEFL2 course
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
• Certified face-to-face 5-day-long courses in Poland, Greece and Slovenia
• Online self-study and Moodle
Developing good practice in EFLteacher training on dyslexia
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
MOOC 2015 and 2016(Massive open online learning course)
• Series of (pre/post) survey and quasi experimental studies that investigate how the knowledge, concerns, attitudes and self-efficacy of language teachers change as a result of participation in the DysTEFL training
Developing good practice in EFLteacher training on dyslexia
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
Voices from teachers
I think the most important thing I've learnt here is not to panic. Accommodations are far easier than anyone would think and they benefit everyone in the class.
Voices from teachers
For the first time in his English lesson, my 3rd grade dyslexic student saw his work on the board. He was very proud and I was very grateful. That was just because I have implemented some of the things I've learned in this course. I used bigger font, simplified and highlighted the instruction. That little touch made a difference for him. Thank you.
Voices from experts
(…) the resources bring together a range of materials that represent the best that are currently universally available.
The ELTons, international awards sponsored by the Cambridge English, reward innovative educational resources in the area of English language teaching (ELT).
Voices from experts
European Language Label 2014 award for finding innovative and creative ways to improve the quality of EFL teacher training schemes and enhancing the quality of EFL teaching and promotion of inclusive practices in mainstream foreign language education.
• In 2016 DysTEFL project has been selected as a “success story” by a panel of experts from the Directorate-General for Education and Culture of the European Commission.
• „Success stories” are finalised projects that have distinguished themselves by their impact, contribution to policy-making, innovative results and creative approach and can be a source of inspiration for others.
• Only 118 out of 23597.
Voices from experts
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
Inclusive practice
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Project N° 2014-1-PL01-KA200-003578
