Dyslexia and Foreign Language Learning

Elke Schneider, Margaret Crombie

• Publisher: David Fulton Publishers
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136611780
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Offering strategies and techniques for teaching modern foreign languages - an often severely challenging subject for pupils with dyslexia - this book is specifically designed to meet the needs of the busy subject specialist teacher looking for guidance on supporting pupils.

Chapter 1

Success in a Mainstream Foreign Language Classroom

Dyslexic pupils in inclusive foreign language courses

In any foreign language classroom there will be a variety of students with various linguistic strengths and weaknesses. All are entitled to attend and participate in foreign language classes. Thus, today’s foreign language educator faces the entire spectrum of foreign language learners from very good or gifted to very poor in one and the same class and has the task to meet all their individual needs in the ‘least restrictive environment’. This situation is referred to as ‘inclusive learning’ and has become the law in many Western countries (e.g. the United Kingdom, Germany and the USA). Young people today are entitled to be included in mainstream classrooms regardless of the type and degree of their difficulty. For the majority of pupils with disabilities, this is undoubtedly most beneficial. With regard to foreign language learning and dyslexia, however, there are FL educators, administrators and parents who would doubt whether students with dyslexia should even attempt a foreign language, given their difficulties with processing language and identifying language patterns on their own. For teachers who believe in the rights of all young people to be included with their peer group, to gain knowledge of foreign culture and language, and to enhance their professional opportunities in the future, the dilemma is not whether to include children with difficulties, but how to include them successfully through appropriate accommodations. Unfortunately, training in accommodations for students with language processing difficulties has not been a routine part of teacher education in most foreign language teacher education programmes. Despite these challenges, we owe it to our pupils to give them opportunities that will help them realise their potential in a foreign language environment.

In order to succeed in this endeavour, FL educators have to realise that inclusion is not about staying the pace whatever the costs. While dyslexic individuals may be physically included in an FL language classroom, they may themselves opt out of involvement and develop negative attitudes within that environment if the curriculum or the ways of presenting it are inappropriate to their ways of learning. Failure to learn and true inclusion, however, are not compatible, and thus this book introduces interested FL educators to a variety of strategies and gives background information essential to developing a positive learning environment for dyslexic students in their inclusive classrooms. The recommendations suggested have been researched thoroughly and represent the most up-to-date information available on FL teaching to dyslexic students. The language teaching suggestions were designed predominantly with alphabetic languages in mind. They are also adjustable to any age group. All ideas have been compiled in the attempt to support the recent noticeable increased interest in and awareness of the need for special accommodations for students with dyslexia in language learning courses since the First International Conference on Multilingualism and Dyslexia took place in Manchester, England, in 1999. This conference was supported by the British Dyslexia Association, the International Dyslexia Association and the European Dyslexia Association and since then well-attended biannual conferences have served to illustrate growing awareness of, and willingness to gain well-informed, research-based information about, improving teaching and learning environments for dyslexic students and their FL educators.

There has been no attempt to differentiate between pictographic scripts and those more geared to the European context. The term ‘dyslexia’ is generally associated with reading, spelling and writing difficulties. However, dyslexia generally has wider connotations, and difficulties affect various aspects of language processing generally. Techniques and strategies presented in this book are relevant, no matter which country or language we consider.

Reasons for language learning difficulties

In the eighties and early nineties, some educators thought they had found the answer to any problems that dyslexic students were likely to face. Because the difficulties were based on an assumption of oral and receptive competence in their native language when compared to reading and writing difficulties, it was assumed that dyslexic pupils would be able to speak and understand a foreign language without undue problems (Crombie 1995). It was assumed that the dyslexic student would be able to listen and speak in a foreign language just fine because he or she managed to perform well in listening and speaking in the native language. Recommendations then were to omit the reading and writing elements of the language to avoid the perceived areas of difficulty.

Dyslexic pupils would then be able to cope with the foreign language just as they did in English. This did not, however, take account of other areas that dyslexic young people find problematic, and therefore the anticipated overall success was seldom achieved. While the early anticipations of success in language learning have since been challenged, this is not to say that dyslexic students cannot meet success, and some teachers have celebrated such achievements. This book sets out to correct misconceptions about language learning and dyslexia, to challenge some of the views held and to propose methods by which teachers can maximise the effect of their efforts in enabling young people’s success in language learning. Illustrations are given in this chapter of successful students’ experiences in order that those who are keen to meet the needs of dyslexic students might feel encouraged and gain confidence to be able to help.

Dyslexia is defined slightly differently in different countries. Even within one country definitions vary (British Psychological Society 1999; Eames 2002). It is safe to say though that dyslexia is understood as a language processing difficulty to varying degrees that affects mainly reading and writing in letter, number and/or musical symbols. These difficulties occur because of differing abilities of the brain to process auditory and/or visually presented information. While dyslexia cannot be cured, specific accommodations through professional teaching can provide the dyslexic individual with successful coping strategies (Augur 1993: 1; Birsh 1999).

Generally, poorly performing FL students with dyslexia should not be accused of lack of motivation or even be blamed for their difficulties. Rather, as researchers Ganschow and Sparks point out in many of their studies (Ganschow et al. 1998), it is the linguistic difficulties that cause frustration and low motivation to continue with FL studies. This is especially true if the FL educator has not had training opportunities in the identification of dyslexic students’ needs nor been introduced to successful accommodation strategies. Due to lack of such background information, the underlying difficulties that affect dyslexic people often go unrecognised.

Underlying problems associated with dyslexia can cause many of the frustration and emotional problems that inhibit dyslexic learners. Factors such as poor phonological processing skills, weak short-term and working memory, word-finding difficulties, slower speed of processing, difficulties with auditory perception and discrimination and/or auditory sequencing problems, automaticity problems, difficulties with syntax and grammar cause further problems. These are frequently exacerbated by low self-esteem and motivation. All these contribute to present a major challenge to both the dyslexic learner and the FL teacher. While dyslexic students exhibit a pattern of such difficulties, they do not necessarily exhibit all of them (Miles 1993). This differential pattern of difficulties means that students will not all respond in exactly the same way to chosen accommodation activities presented in this book. Each student has a unique profile of strengths and weaknesses. It is necessary then to get to know the students and their particular strengths through regular dialogue and an agreement between student and teacher to experiment with a variety of strategies to find the ones that work best for each individual in order to maximise chances of success. Success can only be achieved if there is harmony between the teacher and the learner and an atmosphere of trust in the knowledge that constructive risk-taking can only be of benefit.

Research done in America by Le Ganschow and Richard Sparks and their colleagues propose a Linguistic Coding Differences Hypothesis (LCDH) in support of the following strategies. This hypothesis entails three major findings supported by over ten years of research:

1. Both encoding (producing the language information in written or oral form through writing or speaking) and decoding skills (taking in language information from written or oral sources by listening or reading) in one’s native language serve to facilitate learning another language. Weaknesses in any one or several of these skills in one’s native language therefore make foreign language learning more challenging. More specifically, strengths and weaknesses in the linguistic ‘codes’ of phonology/orthography (sound/symbol relations), syntax (grammar) and semantics (related to meaning of words) all pertain and transfer between languages.

2. The two linguistic areas with the most frequent negative impact on FL learning were, first, phonological-orthographic processing skills, followed by syntactic processing skills. Semantic processing skills were found to be less influential in the Ganschow and Sparks studies (Ganschow et al. 1998; Ganschow and Sparks 1995).

3. Negative attitude towards FL learning is more likely a consequence of these identified linguistic processing weaknesses than the initial cause of poor FL performance.

These findings make it clear that reading, writing, listening and speaking skills in the FL are all significantly affected by weaknesses in linguistic coding skills even when the native language has been well mastered through years of developing strategies and overlearning to the point where automaticity has been achieved. The underlying language processing difficulties and differences are still likely to affect the student when exposed to foreign language learning. Even though time constraints are a real factor, techniques and strategies must take into account direct and explicit teaching of linguistic encoding and decoding skills in the foreign language.

To understand the complexity of the linguistic coding differences that affect a dyslexic FL learner, a brief explanation of the major areas of potential weaknesses follow. The reader should keep in mind that any combination of these areas of difficulty can occur within an individual. Also the degree or severity of difficulty varies from individual to individual. For this reason, Ganschow and Sparks suggest picturing dyslexic students in FL classes on a continuum of language processing difficulties. The more areas that are affected and the more severe the difficulties, the more intense the accommodations need to be (Ganschow et al. 1995).

A major cause of language processing difficulty lies in struggles with recognising and using language patterns in the new language. Even when dyslexic individuals have good intellectual ability, they may not be able to notice similarities and differences between:

1. print symbols and their related pronunciations (phonological-orthographic processing);

2. grammatical and syntactical structures in the FL compared to their native language (syntactic-grammatical processing);

3. vocabulary and word formation patterns in the FL compared to their native language (semantic processing) (see Gerber 1993; Schneider 1999: Chapter 3).

Dyslexia is predominantly characterised by phonological-orthographic processing problems (e.g. Stanovich and Siegel 1994; Yopp 1992). Without direct and explicit instruction, dyslexic students in an FL class may, for instance, fail to recognise on their own that the German letter pattern ‘eu’ is pronounced the same way as ‘oy’ in the native language English. To identify the different syntactic pattern in the ‘ne … pas’ construction in French to express negation compared to the way negatives are formed in English (native language) may seem to be an insurmountable challenge. Likewise, placing the infinitive of the main verb at the end of sentences in German is dissimilar from English language sentence construction and may cause major difficulties. Remembering these constructions and when to use them is often problematic.

Lack of automaticity in native language grammar structures combined with poor working memory will exacerbate the problem, resulting in poorly constructed sentences and often translations with many errors or blanks. A dyslexic student may also not succeed in identifying known word parts inside new vocabulary. An example would be to conclude the meaning of the new German word ‘unglaublich’ by seeing the prefix ‘un’, identifying its meaning as a negation, seeing ‘glaub’ as the root and relating it to the known word ‘glauben’ (to believe) and then to conclude that ‘lich’ must be the suffix that identifies the part of speech. Therefore, the new word must mean something in the area of ‘not believable’ which is precisely its meaning. Such transfer of knowledge would require linguistic analysis skills that need to be taught to dyslexic students explicitly. They cannot be assumed to pick these skills up by mere exposure to the FL and by repeating sentences and phrases.

The authors would additionally like to raise awareness of an area of processing difficulty that has not been researched much at this point – a dyslexic student’s ability to identify, understand and use socio-pragmatic language concepts such as idiomatic expressions, humour, jokes, homonyms, homographs, homophones or metaphors in proper discourse in the foreign language. This includes the development of comprehending implicit information ‘in between the lines’ or spoken or written information (Gerber 1993: 63–103). To be successful in these aspects, phonological-orthographic and grammatical-syntactic skills have to be at a reasonable level of competence. Here, as well, explicit instruction and modelling of learning strategies need to be integrated in the FL classroom to ensure success for the dyslexic learner.

In addition to these areas of linguistic processing difficulties, success in FL learning is often slowed down because of poor short-term and working memory (Gerber 1993: 105–33). Difficulties in storing new information in short-term and working memory as well as in retrieval of information affect all areas of a dyslexic young person’s life. Their relevance to FL language learning is apparent as the student tries to commit to memory considerable new vocabulary, new language structures in the areas of phonology, orthography and syntax. When FL information is presented at a ‘natural’ speed, then the slower speed of retrieval from memory will inevitably require additional instructional support (see principles in Chapter 2) and a slowing down of the speed of presentation for the dyslexic student until such time as the skills become automatic and the language can be presented at its natural pace.

Overall, these descriptions of linguistic processing and information retrieval problems illustrate for the FL educator that while some difficulties in reading, writing, listening and speaking in an FL are normal and to be expected for all FL learners, the dyslexic student is likely to experience much more severe difficulties in all task areas. It therefore is necessary for the FL educator to ensure that the dyslexic student will remain motivated and retain self-esteem during the challenges of learning the FL.

Foreseeing possible difficulties and planning how to avoid them as far as possible can help prevent unnecessary anxiety. The sooner specific strategies are put in place to avoid loss of self-concept through failure, the better for the language learning student. Language learning can and should be fun for all. While making that learning fun can be challenging for the teacher, the spin-off for the student will result in a massive boost in self-esteem and motivation for other subjects as well as the modern language. Finding the right techniques can be a matter of trial and error, and requires the teacher to be aware of a whole range of possible ways of teaching dyslexic young people. Where techniques are in place and these meet with only very limited success, it may be necessary to put accommodations in place to ensure that student is truly being included in the class. This may include accommodations such as giving the dyslexic student a reader who can read material aloud instead of having to read the matter himself or herself. It may mean a scribe who can do the writing part of any lesson. It may mean accepting homework on tape, rather than expecting that work will be written. It is for the teacher to find the accommodation that will enable the student to meet with success. Only through helping the student to achieve success will inclusion truly be happening.

Case studies

The following two case studies serve to demonstrate that for some students, success can be gained. Later chapters will illustrate specifically how FL teachers and their assistants can help alleviate problems and ensure a high degree of success. To retain the anonymity of the students, their names have been changed.

James

James came to me as a child of eight years. He was the second of two children, and had an elder sister who had no difficulties at all in school and enjoyed the whole school experience. James had been assessed as dyslexic in school by the local authority educational psychologist. He came across as a clearly bright boy and the educational psychologist’s report supported this hypothesis. James came from a lower middle-class background with supportive parents who were anxious for him to do well. He was a well-motivated but shy boy who made every effort to please his teachers. Discussion with James’s mother revealed that she had not suspected any problem until James started to learn to read and write. On reflection, she was able to tell me that James had struggled to learn nursery rhymes and had never really mastered any of them. He had been a little ‘uncoordinated’ in nursery, but managed to cope with what was asked. When James had been in school for a few months, his mother discovered that James was not learning at the pace of his peers and was rapidly falling behind his classmates. Concerns were at first dismissed by the school who suggested that her expectations were too high, that she was comparing James with his sister and that ‘boys were different any way’. For a time James’s mother was prepared to accept this, but James started to become withdrawn and clearly unhappy. At this point, the parents took the initiative and insisted on a psychologist’s report. By the time the psychologist’s report was received, James was in his third year of primary education. James was then allocated extra help in school and the support of a specialist teacher.

Within a short time, James was beginning to make progress. His self-esteem and motivation had returned and his reading skills were developing. James was excelling in art work and his parents were encouraging this at home. Spelling and other writing skills remained poor, but there were signs of progress with James becoming a reasonably logical, but still poor, speller. Structure of work also remained a problem, and when it came time for James to move to secondary school his mother questioned whether it was appropriate to study a foreign language. If he did, which one should he choose? He had a choice of French or German.

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