Dyslexia or Second Language Learning?

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Dyslexia or Second Language Learning? Martha Youman, PhDc University of Arizona Presented at TESOL Philadelphia 2012

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A review of dyslexia in dyslexia across different languages, the characteristics that distinguish these students with dyslexia from ELLs without dyslexia and the teaching strategies that work with both groups.

Transcript of Dyslexia or Second Language Learning?

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Dyslexia or Second Language Learning? Martha Youman, PhDcUniversity of Arizona

Presented at TESOL Philadelphia 2012

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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

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Part One: What is Dyslexia?

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Every child would read if it were in his power to do so. (Betts, 1936)

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• 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?

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The Neurological Signature of Dyslexia

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Study of 144 matched children B. A. Shaywitz et al. 2002

What is Dyslexia?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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عسر القراءة

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পড়া�র অসু�বিধা�

诵读困难

ordblindhedlukihäiriö

δυσλεξίαדיסלקציה

ดิ�สdislexia

Part Two: Dyslexia Across Languages

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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“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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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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26http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti-O58yWwZg

Teaching Strategies for ELLs and Students with Dyslexia

A Multisensory Activity

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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

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Questions?

http://www.cesl.arizona.edu/TeacherTraining.htm

Martha Youman, PhDc

New Programs Coordinator

[email protected]

Youtube Channel: meyouman81

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