It practically goes without saying that being an effective teacher is not
a plain sailing. The nature of the profession itself is complicated and
challenging as teachers not only deal with issues of teaching qualifications
but concomitantly have to strive to meet parents’ educational expectations and
most importantly have to cope with the multifariousness of students’
dispositions and propensities, and their varying levels of intelligence that
require pedagogical creativity and constant adjustment to teaching methods. As
demanding as it is dealing with children’s multifaceted personalities and
different cognitive performances, teaching normal students pales into
insignificance when compared to teaching kids with special needs that are not
in full possession of all their faculties. There are overt distinctions between
teaching normal children with those with special conditions or have learning
difficulties such as the blind, the mute, the deaf and dumb, children with
attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autistics, dyslexics etc.
Dyslexia which is predominantly reading inability is among the most prevalent
forms of learning difficulties suffered by children, manifesting itself through
a veritably wide range of symptoms where children with this condition differ
considerably from one another.
Dyslexia or word
blindness derives from the Greek dys
(meaning poor) and lexia (meaning word or language), a term
coined by Rudolf Berlin in 1872 who initiated the research on the phenomenon to
label reading difficulties he purported to cause aphasia, a cerebral vascular
injury. Early in its history, dyslexia used to be misinterpreted as a product
of poor visual perception and inaccurately postulated as a specific form of
verbal amnesia where the sufferer has problems memorizing the traditional
meanings of graphic symbols. According to the International Dyslexia
Association (IDA), dyslexia is not a disease or a form of laziness but a
specific, language-based learning incapability of neurobiological origin that
is identified with inaccurate or dysfluent lexical decoding and poor spelling
and writing skills resulting from phonological processing impairment. Dyslexia
is not determined by intellectual aptitude; in fact it occurs in children of
all intelligence levels, including those labeled gifted with degrees of dyslexia ranging from very mild to very
severe. Dyslexia which occurs in a person since birth is caused by biological
changes in the central nervous system which leads to the person’s psychomotor
development discord. Contrary to the normal non
dyslexic brain where the left hemisphere is noticeably bigger than the right,
the dyslexic cerebral hemispheres are more symmetrical.
It is a life-long, inheritable
and untreatable disorder but pertinent studies indicate that despite having no
medicines or services available to cure it, the condition may change naturally
at different phases throughout a person's life or be palliated through early
diagnosis and proper intervention.
In Malaysian setting, to effectively teach dyslexic
children to speak proper English as a second language, teachers should first
understand the complex nature of dyslexia, its types and characteristics in
order to deal with the children better, devise appropriate lesson plans and
prepare efficacious teaching materials. Dyslexia can be categorized into
several types namely surface dyslexia, phonological dyslexia, deep dyslexia,
concrete word dyslexia and spelling dyslexia.
Children with surface dyslexia exhibit a pattern characterized by better
ability to read short words as opposed to long ones and reading well only by
well-established phonological rules but have difficulties perusing meaningful
words and reading will falter when encountering orthographical irregularities.
Those with phonological dyslexia who have grapheme-phoneme conversion
impairment are capable to read familiar words well but have difficulty with
function words, non-words and words read through a phonetic system. Despite
being able to process letter strings and understands what is read, they cannot
produce oral reading. Deep dyslexia, a combination of impaired grapheme-phoneme
conversions with phonological dyslexia, manifests itself in children through
semantic paralexic and visual-semantic paralexic errors where they have
difficulties with non-words, verbs, and abstract nouns and depend heavily on
imagination, concreteness, and word frequency, as well as context effect.
Students with concrete word dyslexia have problems with concrete rather than
abstract words, while spelling dyslexia sufferers read a word letter by letter
before they can process it as a whole.
Although clinical
diagnosis is needed to accurately determine if a child has dyslexia, its
various symptoms can actually be observed. According to Texas Education Agency,
aside from being confused by letters,
numbers and mathematical symbols, words, sequences, or verbal explanations, dyslexics
may also have difficulty in sustaining attention, putting words into thoughts,
are uncoordinated and think mainly with images and feelings rather than sounds
and words. Their discordant mental, visual, oral and hearing faculties render
confusion or some sort of hallucination where they may complain about feeling
or seeing the non-existent instead. However, the fact that they could be
ambidextrous and talented in art, storytelling, designing etc and usually
acquire knowledge best through hands-on experience, experimentations,
demonstrations and visual aids can be manipulated by English teachers to
compensate for the children’s dearth of learning capacity. There have been
numerous programs, methods and techniques designed to aid dyslexic children in
their learning, for instance, Samuel Orton’s Orton-Gillingham Approach, Beth
Slingerland’s Multisensory Approach, Jay Isgur’s Object-Imaging-Projection
Method, Joanna Williams’ The ABD’s of Reading, Charles Shedd’s
Alphabetic-Phonic-Structural Linguistic Approach and Fernald Approach; however
teachers’ selection and application of methods should base on the needs and
suit the uniqueness of each child.
Every learner, normal or
with learning difficulties, has individual preferences for visual, auditory,
kinesthetic or tactile learning style. Judging from the general characteristics
of dyslexics, multisensory approach seems to be a very good base for moderately
dyslexic children to learn English communication, as it is developed to
remediate and integrate their various sensory channels to boost their learning.
It would even be more efficacious to deploy several techniques especially those
that involve the stimulation of the children’s auditory, visual, kinesthetic
and tactile modalities and adapting them to the children’s needs. There are
several general rules English teachers should take into account when dealing
with dyslexic children. Dyslexic children are especially demanding students,
therefore teaching and learning process would be more effective in small groups
so that teachers could apply individual approach which is the best method to
recognize each child’s potential in order to accentuate their abilities and
teach through their strengths.
It is normal for dyslexics to have inferiority complex
which could even be exacerbated when having to engage in something unfamiliar
like English language communication. Teacher’s attentiveness not only helps
them concentrate but also boost their otherwise depleted self-esteem as they
slowly accomplishing one small challenge after another. Explanations or
instructions of tasks should be made short and concise and dyslexics should be
actively involved in learning process as they learn best through experiencing.
When teaching words or phrases, the teacher should ensure that every word is
conveniently displayed and clearly enunciated and make the children repeat
after him/her every time. The use of dictionaries with illustrations is highly
recommended to enrich their vocabulary. As dyslexic learners may have problems
processing what they hear or see, an item should be introduced in different ways
through different senses i.e. sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste, which
require students to look, listen, say, point, read, touch and smell wherever
and whenever appropriate.
Reading, writing and speaking are components of the same
activity therefore to learn speaking skill, one have to concomitantly acquire
the other two domains as well. Although the main objective is to teach the
dyslexics to speak proper English, the English teacher still needs to involve
writing and reading common expressions and spelling certain words as part of
the lesson. English orthography is inconsistent and unruly, a single letter can
represent several different sounds and two different letters can produce one
sound, not to mention many English words feature silent letters, thus, it is
necessary for the teacher to write the words or sentences uttered to connect
the spelling with the sounds they produce. However, the detailed explanations
on the syntactic nature of English and grammar such as the inflection of verbs,
the subject-verb agreement, tenses, etc should be avoided as they may only
confound and dishearten them. Instead it is better to get them accustomed to
English sentence structures through practicing common daily expressions that
are germane to what they want to convey. This way, the teacher could integrate
the concepts of subject-verb agreement, tenses as well as the singularity and
plurality of verbs and nouns through clustered expressions such as ‘She buys an apple’, ’She bought an apple’,
‘They buy apples’, and ‘They bought
apples’.
Suprasegmental features such as intonation, pitch,
stress, rhythm, tempo, tone, intonation, juncture and voice quality which refer
to the sensation of higher and lower tone, the patterns of words and the
durational differences between segments, are inherent in speech. It is
essential to explain to the children in the simple way that speakers apply
these features when they speak in order to express interactional meaning and
feelings toward the matter discussed and toward the interlocutors, and manage
the conversation. For instance, the teacher could introduce the types of
intonation by drawing comparisons between a statement ‘I am a girl’ with a question ‘Am
I a girl?’ where certain words are either stressed or unstressed, and some
are uttered in either rising or falling intonation. In order to speak with
appropriate rhythm, the dyslexic children should be introduce to the concept of
long and short vowels and stressed syllables as well, for example, by making
them listen to the distinction between the expressions ‘She lives’ and ‘She leaves’.
By writing the phrases on the white board, the teacher can point at the
syllable ‘li’ in the word ‘live’ and ‘lea’ in ‘leave’ that
cause the difference in length and stress when pronouncing the words.
Teaching dyslexic
students English communication should be made interesting and enjoyable,
relaxing and encouraging, through the use of a variety of techniques, materials
and multimedia such as flash cards, pictures, illustrations, games, audio,
videos etc that can promote both their short and long term memories. It is
highly preferable if the teacher checks the students’ prior vocabulary
pertinent to the topic before starting a lesson. For instance, before learning
about animals, the teacher can ask the dyslexic students the names of animals
they know in English and when showing a picture of animals, the teacher can
encourage the children to respond verbally by a asking simple question ‘What animal is this?’ and guide them to
answer in the simple way like ‘This is an
elephant’. Fluency in speech can be improved through imitation. By watching
a video that shows common conversations and the contexts they take place, the
teacher can ask the students to imitate the speeches in turns. Games such as Simon Says, Let’s Learn
English, What is This?, etc are
also very conducive in stimulating the students’ visual and auditory
perceptions and supporting their cognitive process.
Dyslexic students may
never be able to converse in a second language such as English at what is
considered the normal fluency rate, let alone to speak as polished as a native
speaker. Techniques for teaching dyslexic learners English are perhaps the
hardest to learn and implement and teaching the language itself requires a long
time frame and continuous effort. Success comes in small increments. If the
trial and error process fails, teachers cannot give up on the children or
decide that there is no point of continuing; instead teachers must always be
looking for new ways to accomplish the objectives. It may take much longer to
help the dyslexics to reach their goals, however the fact that some of them
posses certain talents or specialties can be to teachers’ advantage to focus on
their strengths and have them learn the way they learn best.
Written by:
Norsyuda Mat
SMK Bukit Bunga.
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