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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.
This book addresses specific learning difficulties in reading and spelling – developmental dyslexia. Set in the cross-linguistic context, it presents issues surrounding dyslexia from the perspective of a foreign language teacher. It is intended to serve as a reference book for those involved in foreign language teaching, including experienced in-service teachers and novice teachers, as well as teacher trainers and trainees. It offers an up-to-date and reader-friendly study of the mechanisms of dyslexia and an overview of the current research on the disorder, in theoretical and practical terms. Its aim is to help teachers tackle one of the many challenges they face in the modern classroom: the organization of an effective foreign language teaching process for students with dyslexia.
"According to International Educational Statistics (2008), there are total of 654.9 million school-age children in the world. If dyslexia affects 10-15% of these youth (Fletcher et al. 2007), this translates to approximately 65-98 million students with difficulties in reading and writing. The EU strategic plan for education (2010) recognises the need for EU citizens to speak a foreign language. As such, foreign language courses are introduced on an obligatory basis at the primary level of education. Dyslexic students are not exempt from this regulation, and, thus, are confronted with different language systems that must be mastered. The difficulty here escalates if the systems differ significantly in their levels of orthographic transparency.Reading and writing are operationalised by the same biological functions that are defined by the universal perspective. However, language systems differ in terms of their transparency; for example, English and French are considered opaque scripts, whereas Spanish and Italian are described as transparent orthographies. These differences are discussed in this book as part of the language specific perspective, which can, in turn, raise questions such as: "Is a dyslexic student equally impaired in any language they study?" and "Is the type of difficulty primarily dependent on the language system or is it rather a dyslexia syndrome?" This volume provides answers through a synthesis of research on reading difficulties in first and foreign languages and existing taxonomies of dyslexia sub-types.
This book is intended to help language teachers to work effectively and successfully with students who have specific learning differences (SpLD) such as dyslexia. The book takes an inclusive and practical approach to language teaching and encourages teachers to consider the effects that an SpLD could have on a language learner. It suggests strategies that can be implemented to enable learners to succeed both in the classroom and in formal assessment. The book places issues of language teaching for learners with an SpLD in a broad educational context and, in addition to practical advice on methodologies and classroom management, also discusses discourses of the field, the identification of SpLDs and facilitating progression.
The Second Language Learning Processes of Students with Specific Learning Difficulties is the only recent book available to offer a detailed and in-depth discussion of the second language learning processes of students with specific learning difficulties (SpLDs). It summarizes research advances in the fields of cognitive and educational psychology and integrates them with recent studies in the area of second language acquisition (SLA). Thus the book is relevant not only to readers who are particularly interested in the role of specific learning difficulties in learning additional languages, but also to those who would like to understand how individual differences in cognitive functioning influence SLA. The book focuses on four important areas that are particularly relevant for language learners with SpLDs: the processes of SLA in general and the development of reading skills in particular, the effectiveness of pedagogical programs, the assessment of the language competence of students with SpLDs and identifying SpLDs in another language. The book also views learners with SpLDs in their social and educational contexts and elaborates how the barriers in these contexts can affect their language learning processes. This is an excellent resource for language teachers, students, and researchers in the areas of second language acquisition and applied linguistics.
ENDORSEMENTS "This book is a conduit for students, teachers, and teacher educators -- a carefully guided path to making language learning not only possible, but meaningful and fun " --Marjorie Hall Haley, PhD, Board of Directors of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), Director of Foreign Language Teacher Licensure, George Mason University "Professor Konyndyk has developed a foreign-language pedagogy that makes students' deserts bloom. Foreign-language instructors and special educators will find themselves grateful to her for this contribution. --Lynn E. Snyder, PhD, CCC-SLP, Professor Emerita and Former Director of the Center for Language and Learning, University of Colorado at Boulder "Though I was told for such a long time 'No, you can't, ' you constantly were a voice saying 'Yes, you can and you will.' You not only helped show me that the world of language is one that is possible for me, but you also showed me the way that we . . . can have such a positive impact on the lives of others." --a personal note from one of Irene's own at-risk students ABOUT FOREIGN LANGUAGES FOR EVERYONE "This book is about how I learned to teach a second language to those who either have failed before or were not really given a chance to succeed. I wrote it to help others to be smart, productive teachers of foreign languages to students with learning disabilities. The book called me. My life journey prepared and inspired me to write it." --Irene Brouwer Konyndyk, from her preface Foreign Languages for Everyone is based on Professor Irene Brouwer Konyndyk's careful study and classroom experience teaching foreign languages effectively to students with learning disabilities. The goal of serving at-risk students became highly personal for Irene when she realized that her own daughter had a learning disability but could succeed academically with the right combination of multisensory learning experiences. This is a wonderfully practical and inspiring book loaded with practical tips and pedagogical insights for successfully teaching foreign languages to children, young people, high school and college students, and older adults who have difficulty learning a second language. ABOUT IRENE AND HER FREE ONLINE RESOURCES Irene Brouwer Konyndyk has taught languages at all levels -- from elementary through college. She received the Calvin College Innovative Teaching Award for her groundbreaking work developing a successful curriculum for at-risk second-language learners. She leads workshops across North America. Her free website, FOREIGN LANGUAGES FOR EVERYONE, provides: (1) downloadable copies of book-related appendixes, forms, and lesson plans, (2) illustrative video and audio clips, (3) news about important developments at the intersections of special education, learning disabilities, and foreign-language instruction, and (4) a community for second-language instructors to share best practices. TEACHING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE (ESL) This book is ideal for educators and volunteers who teach English as a second language (ESL).
This edited book uses the concept of diversity in child foreign language education as a major organizing principle. Since a foreign language, most typically English, is taught globally to an increasing number of children, the variability in the process and varied learning outcomes are inescapable phenomena. This book has been constructed on the premise that heterogeneity, first, concerns young language learners, who due to the disparity in the pace of development need appropriately tailored educational solutions, and, second, it refers to a diversity of contexts in which learning takes place. The contexts can be defined on a macroscale (e.g. different countries), mesoscale (e.g. different institutions), and microscale (e.g. specific learner groups). The book consists of four thematic strands. In Part One the learner-internal causes of heterogeneity of young language learners are clarified. Part Two presents a sample of classroom studies in which learner variables, such as gender, learner preferences, and special needs are taken into account. Part Three looks at teaching materials and how they meet learners’ needs. Finally, Part Four highlights diversity issues that teachers should be prepared to face.
Many of today's foremost innovators from a variety of fields--business, medicine, law, entertainment, design, government and literature--are dyslexic. Most rose to their positions through talent, grit, and a careful navigation of barriers. Meet some of these leaders in the pages of this book.
In the study of bilingualism, the lexical level of language is of prime importance because, in practical terms, vocabulary acquisition is an essential prerequisite for the development of skill in language use; from a theoretical point of view, the mental lexicon, as a bridge between form and meaning, plays a crucial role in any model of language processing. A central issue in this volume is at which level of the bilingual speaker's lexicon languages share representations and how language-specific representations may be linked. The contributors favor a dynamic, developmental perspective on bilingualism, which takes account of the change of the mental lexicon over time and pays considerable attention to the acquisition phase. Several papers deal with the level of proficiency and its consequences for bilingual lexical processing, as well as the effects of practice. This discussion raises numerous questions about the notion of (lexical) proficiency and how this can be established by objective standards, an area of study that invites collaboration between researchers working from a theoretical and from a practical background.
Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Graz (Anglistik), course: Research Perspectives on Second Language Acquisition, language: English, abstract: After a general overview on Dyslexia, defining it as an impairment of the ability to recognize and comprehend written language, accompanied by difficulties in writing and spelling as well as slow reading and reduced reading comprehension, general facts about the deficit are presented, such as its prevalence and its official definition in the international ICD-10 catalogue. With regard to the effects of Dyslexia on foreign language learning the topic of orthographies is discussed and various examples for transparent and less transparent orthographies are provided, as several studies have suggested that the transparency of an orthography determines the ease and speed of reading and writing in a language. The orthography of the German and English language are discussed and differences in transparency are pointed out. German, having a rather transparent orthography, i.e. clear-cut grapheme-phoneme correspondences, is easier to adapt to than English, which has a deep orthography with irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondences. The fact that English is an obligatory subject in most curricula makes it essential to find ways to deal with its inconsistency and to design helpful material for both, normally developing and dyslexic students. Several findings about the effects of Dyslexia on foreign language learning are relevant for the foreingn language classroom. Implications for teaching techniques, material and lesson planning are discussed in this paper.
