Teaching English as a foreign language to people with dyslexia

In The Netherlands foreign language learning is an compulsory part of the education system. All students have to learn at least one foreign language of which English is obligatory and every other language, e.g. French, Spanish, Greek or Latin, are mandatory. When it comes to dyslexia there are a lot of myths, for instance that people with dyslexia see things backwards, or that dyslexia is very rare. Some people even believe that it is a vision and auditory problem and that people with dyslexia cannot read (Cimermanová, 2015).
               Dyslexia is associated with native language learning. Studies confirmed that performances on standard measures of native language skills can be related to the level of foreign language proficiency (Cimermanová, 2015). The British Dyslexia Association (2015) states that some dyslexic children are only likely to achieve a limited competence in a foreign language. Though there are some experts who think learners with dyslexia should not study a foreign language, the British Dyslexia Association (2015) claims that it is important to give students with dyslexia the opportunity to participate in communicative activities. This brings them additional benefits such as an enhanced social development.

What are the symptoms?

Dyslexia is a language learning disability. It refers to the problems with reading, but students with dyslexia generally experience difficulties with spelling, pronunciation and writing as well. Dyslexia is a learning disability that has neurological origins for which it cannot be cured. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and fluent word recognition, poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties mostly result from a deficit in the phonological component of language (Cimermanová, 2015). Because it cannot be cured, it is a chronic, lifelong condition which is hereditary.  

Why dyslexia isn’t necessarily a liability in reading English

When it comes to reading and writing in a mother tongue, this might not sound very hard. But for people with dyslexia this can be quite challenging. When it comes to learning a foreign language in school, many children with dyslexia feel the ordeal of mastering literacy skills all over again not worth the time and effort (Cicerchia, 2016). Recent studies have shown that some students with dyslexia score surprisingly good when it comes to English reading tasks. These students appear to have an very specific skill they can use effectively when reading English (Koelen & Visser, 2010).
               The verity between students with dyslexia is very high, both in how severe the dyslexia is and in the specific problems that come with it. Students with dyslexia can be roughly divided into two categories: students with phonological dyslexia and students with surface dyslexia. These two groups show completely different patterns when it comes to reading problems. Students with phonological dyslexia (the ‘guessers’) have problems with the spelling; they can’t easily combine letters to sounds and are therefore forces to read words as a whole. This usually leads to more reading errors. Especially unknown words are hard for these ‘guessers’. The other group, students with surface dyslexia (the ‘spellers’), can connect letters to sounds, but can’t read words as a whole. They usually read slower and have the same amount of difficulty with non-words or unknown words than with words they are familiar with. Especially words written irregularly, where letters don’t accord with the sound, are hard for ‘spellers’. Students without dyslexia can use both the guessing and the spelling strategy (Koelen & Visser 2010).
               Some languages are more transparent than others. Orthographically transparent languages are languages in which the spelling of words is almost an exact representative of how the words are pronounced. Examples of orthographic languages are Fins, Spanish, Italian and Turkish. Other languages are more focused on the original spelling of a word and less on the pronunciation, therefore similar letter combinations can sometimes result in different pronunciation, think for instance of the words /have/ and /slave/ and in the same way sometimes different letter combinations can result in same pronunciations, for instance in the words /meet/  and /meat/ (Koelen & Visser, 2010). Therefore the ‘Orthographic Depth Hypothesis’ states that regularly spelled languages, like Fins, are more easy to read than deep orthographic languages such as English, French, Arabic or Hebrew (Katz & Frost, 1992).
               Based on the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis it is expected that deep orthographic languages like English are harder to read, especially for students with reading difficulties. But there is a large amount of students who would pick an English book above a Dutch book (Koelen & Visser, 2010). A research performed by Joyce Haisma in 2008 showed that some students perform surprisingly good on English reading tasks. These results can be explained by looking at the difference between guessers and spellers; guessers performed better on reading tasks than spellers. There even wasn’t a visible difference between guessers and students without dyslexia when it came to reading tasks.