Dyslexia or Second Language Learning? Martha Youman, PhDcUniversity of Arizona
Presented at TESOL Philadelphia 2012
This presentation is available at:
http://www.slideshare.net/myouman/dyslexia-or-second-language-learning
Please take my card and email me with any questions.
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• Part One: What is dyslexia?
• Part Two: Dyslexia across different languages
• Part Three: Dyslexia or Second Language Learning
• Part Four: Strategies for ELLs with dyslexia
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Agenda
Part One: What is Dyslexia?
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Every child would read if it were in his power to do so. (Betts, 1936)
• Dyslexia is a neurobiological disorder that affects the development of both decoding (written word pronunciation) and encoding (spelling).
• Students with dyslexia have difficulty reading fluently and spelling words correctly, even after years of instruction.
• 5% to 20% of the U.S. population have dyslexia and up to 40% of the entire U.S. population experiencing some type of reading difficulty (Shaywitz, 2003; S. E. Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2001).
• People with dyslexia who read and write in English read slower (reading never becomes automatic), they spell words as they sound, they usually hate reading, and they may reverse letters and symbols.
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What is Dyslexia?
The Neurological Signature of Dyslexia
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Study of 144 matched children B. A. Shaywitz et al. 2002
What is Dyslexia?
Some Common Misconceptions• Myth: Students who flip numbers and letters have dyslexia.• Fact: Some students with dyslexia show this feature, but this is not
the key feature that defines dyslexia. Laborious reading and poor spelling is.
• Myth: Dyslexia can be cured with enough reading practice.• Fact: Dyslexia cannot be cured because it is a disorder of the
brain. However, strategies can help students with dyslexia compensate for their difficulties. Overcoming Dyslexia (S. Shaywitz, 2003)
• Myth: Students with dyslexia have a lower IQ.• Fact: Students with dyslexia are just like everyone. They just have
difficulty reading. Some even learn to compensate for their disability and become very good at other things that don’t involve reading.
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What is Dyslexia?
Some Common Misconceptions (Continued)• Myth: All students with dyslexia are gifted.• Fact: You will find students with dyslexia that are gifted just like
you find non-dyslexic students that are gifted.• Myth: Dyslexia only occurs in English because it is a very
irregular language. In “easy” languages like Spanish, there is no dyslexia.
• Fact: Remember, dyslexia is a neurobiological disorder (i.e. brain-based disorder), not a language based disorder. The language a person reads, however, will determine how dyslexia occurs.
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What is Dyslexia?
An Example of Dyslexia
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Translation: Like me, I have a disability. I’ve had it since third grade. I’m often quitting because of my disability. For example, I know how hard it is. I can’t spell right. I’ve been trying for all my life. I know I’m afraid to write a note to my girl friend. She doesn’t know that I have it but I don’t know how to tell her because I don’t know how she is going to act. I don’t know why I am telling you but I know that I’m not stupid.
David’s note to his ninth-grade teacher. From Essentials of Dyslexia (2011)
What is Dyslexia?
القراءة عسر
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পড়া�র অসু�বিধা�
诵读困难
ordblindhedlukihäiriö
δυσλεξίαדיסלקציה
ดิ�สdislexia
Part Two: Dyslexia Across Languages
The Role of Orthography• Orthography, or how a language is represented in writing,
impacts reading and writing development and can present varying difficulties to speakers of a specific language who have dyslexia.
• The most common orthographies today can be classified into alphabetic, syllabic, and logographic writing systems.
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Dyslexia Across Languages
Non-Alphabetic Orthographies (e.g. Chinese)
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• Slow and inaccurate reading.• Poor character formation in writing.• Confusion of the parts that make a word.• Use of wrong tone when reading.
Dyslexia Across Languages
Alphabetic Orthographies
“Shallow” and “Deep” orthographies
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• Shallow orthographies have one to one correspondence between letters and sounds. The language is written as it sounds.
• Deep orthographies have multiple mappings between letters and sounds. Spelling patterns are irregular and don’t follow the sounds of the language.
Dyslexia Across Languages
Shallow Alphabetic Orthographies (e.g. Spanish)• Characterized by slow, but not necessarily inaccurate, reading
(Davies & Cuentos, 2010). • Once Spanish-speaking readers with dyslexia master the letters
and corresponding sounds of the alphabet, the one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters facilitates their reading and spelling.
• They never become fluent• They don’t get the meaning from the text because they are so
concerned with reading.
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Dyslexia Across Languages
Deep Alphabetic Orthographies (e.g. English)• In addition to slow and inaccurate reading, these students will
have persistent poor spelling.• Poor phonological awareness (manipulating the sounds that
make up each word).• Students can’t remember the irregularities of the language, even
after years of reading instruction.• Dyslexia in deep orthographies is pretty obvious.
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Dyslexia Across Languages
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Part Three: Dyslexia or Second Language Learning
“English Sucks!” Why do our students find English to be so difficult?
Answer: Because there are so many irregularities (a.k.a. “sucky” parts). Here are some:
• Single letters that represent multiple sounds (e.g. cone and pot where the letter ‘o’ represents both the sound /ou/ and /o/; cup and pencil and where the letter ‘c’ represents both the sound /k/ and /s/
• Spellings that change morphological meaning, but are pronounced differently (e.g. –ed suffix to indicate past tense pronounced differently in painted /ed/, played /d/, and liked /t/)
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Dyslexia or Second Language Learning
There are more sucky parts!
• Phonemes or sounds that can be spelled in several different ways (e.g. the sound /f/ can be spelled with f as in frog, ph as in phone, ff as in stuff, gh as in cough, and lf as in calf.
• Several letters represent one single sound or phoneme (e.g. fight, might, night where the grapheme ght represents the sound /t/).
• Different spelling possibilities to represent words that sound the same but have different meanings (i.e. homophones; e.g. to, two, too and heal, heel, he’ll)
• Identical words that change meaning depending on the context in which they appear (e.g. “She cannot bear to see her father in pain.” and “The bear attacked the campers.”)
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Dyslexia or Second Language Learning
Learning to read and write in English
• Children and ESL students always have trouble with the “sucky” part of English.
• After a few years (for children) or months (for ESL students), they get the irregularities of the language.
• Dyslexic students will not.• Some ESL students with dyslexia don’t know they have a
problem because they learned to read and write in language with a shallow orthography.
• Some students with dyslexia are not diagnosed in their countries because the culture doesn’t believe in learning disabilities. They are just perceived as “lazy” or “dumb.”
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Dyslexia or Second Language Learning
Dyslexia or Second Language LearningWhy is it important to differentiate the two groups if
they both need help?
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Because their brains are different and the interventions they need are different.
The Profile of a Typical ELLCaution: Many early reading and spelling behaviors of ESL
students resemble those of readers with dyslexia. It may take several years for these similarities to fade, even after intensive English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction.
• Low Vocabulary • Younger students: usually lag behind because they are learning
to read a language they don’t speak. As vocabulary grows, reading ability grows.
• Older students who have solid L1(Atwill et al., 2010):– Vocabulary and litereacy development in L1 may positively
influence cross-language transfer of reading skills.– Negative transfer of first-language knowledge may affect
reading development in English. 21
Dyslexia or Second Language Learning
Some Examples of Negative Transfer in the Typical ELL
• Pronunciation errors due to non-existent sounds in L1 (e.g. in Spanish: reads drogstore for drugstore
• Phonetic Spelling (e.g. writes mejr for measure; teech for teach)• Spelling errors due to non-existing sounds in L1 (e.g. Arabic:
bicture for picture; Chinese: pray for play)• Reversals• Missing vowels• Missing articles, endings, plurals, tenses
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Dyslexia or Second Language Learning
The Profile of an ELL with Dyslexia• A student with high vocabulary who is still misspelling common words
(e.g. womin for women; wal for wall; nos for nose; I have too pets)• A student at an intermediate level who can’t get the gist of a very basic
book• A student who hates reading• Slow reading (e.g. when asked to read aloud, the student seems to be
reading word by word without getting the meaning)• A student in at a beginner level who fails to recognize common words,
even after extensive review (e.g. emphasis on wrong syllable). The students treats the word as a word he/she has never seen it
• A student with high vocabulary who continues to use phonetic spelling of common words at levels 50 and up (e.g. well come to the reel world)
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Dyslexia or Second Language Learning
Part Four: Teaching Strategies for ELLs and Students with Dyslexia
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Teaching Strategies for ELLs and Students with Dyslexia
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Students with Dyslexia ELLs without Dyslexia
BothBasic phonics
Books on tape Multisensory activities
The ability to show knowledge orally
Word processing technology Reading and writing Practice
More exposure to reading
Time
Vocabulary building
Opportunities for Positive transference
Early reading and spellingskills
ScaffoldingOne-on-one instruction
Challenging activities
Motivation
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Teaching Strategies for ELLs and Students with Dyslexia
A Multisensory Activity
References
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Betts, E. A. (1936). The prevention and correction of reading difficulties. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson and Company.
Shaywitz, S. E. (2003). Overcoming dyslexia: A new and complete science-based program for reading problems at any level. New York, NY: Knopf.
Shaywitz, S. E., & Shaywitz, B. A. (2001, August). The neurobiology of reading and dyslexia. Focus on Basics: Connecting research and practice, 5(A), 11–15. Retrieved from: http://www.ncsall.net/fileadmin/resources/fob/2001/fob_5a.pdf
Shaywitz, B., Shaywitz, S., Pugh, K., Mencl, W., Fulbright, R., Skudlarski, P., …Gore, J. C. (2002). Disruption of posterior brain systems for reading in children with developmental dyslexia. Biological Psychiatry, 52(2), 101–110. doi:10.1007/s10038-006-0088-z
Davies, R., & Cuentos, F. (2010). Reading acquisition and dyslexia in Spanish. In N. Brunswick, S. McDougall, & P. de Mornay Davies (Eds.), Reading and dyslexia in different orthographies (pp. 155–180). Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press.
Atwill, K., Blanchard, J., Christie, J., Gorin, J., & García, H. (2010). English-language learners: Implications of limited vocabulary for cross-language transfer of phonemic awareness with kindergartners. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 9, 104–129. doi:10.1177/1538192708330431
Questions?
http://www.cesl.arizona.edu/TeacherTraining.htm
Martha Youman, PhDc
New Programs Coordinator
Youtube Channel: meyouman81
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