Reading disability(dyslexia)HELP

Bluesky · Post by **Bluesky** » Sun Oct 16, 2005 7:38 am

Hi for every body,
I'm a student in a collage of education. after 3 years I'm going to be a teacher. In the mean I'm writing a report about reading disability(dyslexia). I would like to ask every teacher in the forum to give me the poit of view about this prroblem and how to handle a student in you classroom with this disability. I will be very greatful with your help

Andrew Patterson · Post by **Andrew Patterson** » Sun Oct 16, 2005 8:33 am

1. There are different types of dyslexia eg dysphasia.

2. From the few dyslexic students that I have taught, I couldn't help noticing that dyslexia seems to affect the ability to order ideas in general as well as just letters and words. It will affect the order of ideas in a sentence, in a paragraph and on a whole essay level.

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Sun Oct 16, 2005 5:07 pm

Sure glad to hear that you are interested. There is an enormous amount of information on the Web. Look up some of the Associations to do with this subject and you will find chat line for students.

There has been some research done by a fellow in Israel that looks very promising. I can't think of his name at the moment, sorry but will try and look it up. He uses Systemic Functional Linguistics to study writing done by dyslexic students to see where they go wrong.

One of the problems I have is story telling rather than being able to write academically. I also skip over ideas because they go through my head too quickly and I expect people to be able to follow along as quickly as I am thinking. It is annoying for me to slow down and explain my thinking and annoying for them as they don't see how I got to where I am from where I was. It depends on my ability to concentrate at a certain time if my spelling and grammar are correct. I am easily distracted and noise, lights, the physical situation in the classroom and so on can really affect my ability to concentrate on what you want me to do. I may be really good for 15 minutes and then begin to lose it. Since I can be verbally impressive, many teachers couldn't understand why I wasn't as good at the written work or could be good for the first half of the period and not be able to carry on for the whole period or the whole exam. I happen to learn visually and need constant visual input so lectures are a horror for me. I just have to turn off my brain and write the lecture word for word and then understand it afterwards when I read it and the accompanying text book. Studying Genre with Beverly Deriwianka from Australia was the best thing I have done lately to help me understand what I need to do for specific writing situations.

Keep up the good work and I hope it helps you in your teaching in the future.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Sun Oct 16, 2005 10:41 pm

Presumably, Bluesky's atrocious spelling and punctuation is his way of showing solidarity with his future students.

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 5:14 pm

There you go. I didn't even notice Bluesky's mistakes on first reading. I am using my old posts as a study to see where I go wrong as well. Some people kindly email me with private notes to point out my mistakes and then I can add them to my list. Fascinating thing, these brains of ours. You are blessed with an abundance of attention to detail and the ability to understand the underpinings of the language, Stephen and Andrew. I am glad to learn from you.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Mon Oct 17, 2005 6:17 pm

Finding spelling mistakes is probably a matter of too many hours of practice correcting students' scripts.

Wish the ability was transferrable to finding my own before they get posted

I do find it slower to read texts that contain spelling errrors and are lacking full stops and capital letters. If English Language teachers don't make an effort to avoid such mistakes, who will?

Tara B · Post by **Tara B** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 6:24 am

What I have learned about disabilities is that they are extremely complicated and each student is unique. My experience with students with disabilities is that getting the academic skills in thier first language is hard enough for them that they should really avoid emigrating or studying other languages if possible.

I would recommend that you ask someone with some formal training in special education.

EH · Post by EH » Fri Oct 21, 2005 4:55 pm

Hi Tara B. We seem to be posting on a lot of the same topics. On this one, my opinion differs from yours, though.

Learning disabilities in multilinguals is one of my main professional interests, so I've done a lot of research on it. While the literature is not complete on this topic, what is there strongly suggests that students with dyslexia can usually benefit from learning a second language. It's often a struggle for them, more so than for students without dyslexia. But that does not mean they will not succeed. And in fact, learning a second language can often help dyslexic students focus more on what they need to learn in their first language. There's often that carryover effect.

Anecdotally, I always look back at one of my students from years ago. I used to teach Chinese before I got into ESL. This was one of my dyslexic students. He was a native English speaker and loved learning Chinese because everyone else in the class of native English-speakers was as clueless as he was to start with, and his family thought he was amazing to even attempt Chinese. Last year I heard that he's now a high-level executive in a multinational corporation, and they sent him to work in the Beijing office because of his incredible Chinese skills. (While I, the teacher without dyslexia, can no longer even hold a decent conversation in Chinese because I haven't used it in so long... yeesh... ).

Bluesky, if you want any more specific help feel free to PM me. You might want to look at the book, "Multilingualism, Literacy, and Dyslexia" by Lindsay Peer and Gavin Reid. It has a bunch of case studies and research summaries in it. You might also want to take a look at the International Dyslexia Association (www.interdys.org I think), the British Dyslexia Association (they're really good), and the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (www.ASHA.org).

And Andrew Patterson--I was curious... what do you mean by dysphasia? Usually that (or aphasia) is used to describe people who have lost oral communication skills secondary to brain injury. When they lose written communication skills it is usually called dysgraphia. Did you have experience working on reading skills with a dysphasic person?

-EH

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 6:02 pm

Please don't exclude students with dyslexia from your second language classes. Here I am with a full blown case and I emigrated to five different countries and got along well. We all have different skills and learning languages is easy for me because I am trying so hard. From experience I would recommend learning Latin as that helped me with English. Of course I am not an expert in any language including my native language but it doesn't stop me from having good conversations and being able to tell jokes and so on in my second languages. I learn accents very quickly and body language and the basics in survival Mongolian or whatever. As long as we can find out the way that we learn and be allowed to do that we can learn anything that we are interested in. Dyslexia doesn't mean that we are mentally challenged. We usually just don't fit into the standard traditional classroom that has an emphasis on verbal learning. If you get us excited about learning we do things that we would never do for ourselves if left on the back burner because of a label. Label jars on the shelf, not people.

Andrew Patterson · Post by **Andrew Patterson** » Fri Oct 21, 2005 7:49 pm

EH wrote:

And Andrew Patterson--I was curious... what do you mean by dysphasia? Usually that (or aphasia) is used to describe people who have lost oral communication skills secondary to brain injury. When they lose written communication skills it is usually called dysgraphia. Did you have experience working on reading skills with a dysphasic person?

EH, I don't know enough even to give a definition. (I thought it was the tendency to swap letters round but I might be wrong.) I only gave it as an example to show that there are different types of dyslexia, which is something that does need to be born in mind. By what you wrote, it sounds like I may have been wrong to use this exact word. This is not an area that I claim to know much about.

It would be nice to have a list of the different types of dyslexia and their definitions if you have one, though.

Tara B · Post by **Tara B** » Sat Oct 22, 2005 5:58 am

Thanks for keeping me on the straight and narrow, EH and Sally. I would not want to limit a student by telling them what they can't do.

I guess I don't have enough experience with special needs students yet. . . Of the few students like this in ESL programs I have seen, none of them was getting the help they need and succeeding. I guess that's why I was so pessimistic. It's nice to know there is hope.

EH · Post by EH » Sat Oct 22, 2005 4:36 pm

William Patterson, you asked about types of dyslexia.
There aren't, to my knowledge, a bunch of other diagnosis names to learn. But there are subtypes. Dyslexia subtypes are a bit controversial, in that it's easy to say "this person can't read well" but harder to say exactly what combination of lacking skills is the cause for this particular person's problem. And the answer can change depending on the script--people have trouble reading Japanese, for instance, for different reasons than why people have trouble reading English. That said, however, here are some directions the field has taken:

1) Phonological deficits.
Some people have trouble with precise processing and production of sounds, especially vowels. They also have trouble associating letters with sounds, or can't do it as automatically as people without dyslexia.
2) Orthographical deficits.
Some people have trouble matching chunks of letters with chunks of sounds. They can apply basic phonics rules ("Bone" --> /boun/, but have trouble with the words you just have to memorize ("Gone" is not /goun/).
3) Rapid naming deficits.
Some people just process information more slowly. And if you can't see a combination of letters and instantly recognize the word for what it is, then your slowness makes it more difficult to then process the meaning of the word and its context. Reading becomes very cumbersome.

And other things can make dyslexia more or less severe, such as executive functioning--if a person is very impulsive but has a rapid naming deficit, then the person needs extra time but actually takes less time than most to read and the results are not successful. Plus, some have argued that you can't have dyslexia without a visual processing deficit. I don't know so much about that side of it, though.

Sally Olsen:
I was so interested to hear that you're good at accents! I've often noticed that some (not all) people with dyslexia seem to have the most native-sounding accents when learning foreign languages. I tried to research that topic but couldn't find anything much. Have you ever looked into this subject?

-EH

Andrew Patterson · Post by **Andrew Patterson** » Sat Oct 22, 2005 4:52 pm

Thanks for the info, EH.

Only my name is Andrew Patterson not William Patterson.

EH · Post by EH » Mon Oct 24, 2005 7:54 pm

Oh for goodness sake!

Sorry about that. William Patterson's the University, right?

Andrew Patterson · Post by **Andrew Patterson** » Mon Oct 24, 2005 8:54 pm

EH wrote:

William Patterson's the University, right?

I didn't know that til you told me so I checked it's William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey, but it's Paterson with one "t" only there. Then again my surname can be spelt in so many ways, it doesn't bare thinking about:
Paterson Patersone Patersoun Patersoune Patesone Patheson Patieson Patirsone Patirsoun Patison Patisone Patisoune Patonson Patonsoun Pattinson Pattison Pattisoune Pattounsoun Patynson Patyrson, etc

Andrew Paterson one "t" better known as Banjo Paterson wrote Waltzing Matilda.