Dyslexic learners and writing: some suggestions

 

Over the years I have been amassing hands-on experience on the challenges dyslexic people are faced with when trying to compose a piece of writing which could at least satisfy the requirements of English language qualification exams.

I have tried some techniques which can help learners become more aware of the problems in their writing and provide some clues as to how to deal with them. I will go into those types of activities after I explain the premise on which I have built them.

For a long time now I’ve had the chance to observe and record dyslexic learners’ behaviour in class – especially their method of getting round the painful task of ploughing through a long sentence to make sense of it. My theory is that dyslexics go for the whole rather than the parts. In other words, they will try to decode a word based on the first few letters/sounds and test and retest their reading of it in the given context. At the sentence level, they rely more on key words rather than a word-to-word approach. This saves them the time and pain of a rigorous reading and potentially secures a better result. The same applies to the comprehension of a whole text.

However, in order to write, you normally have to follow the reverse process, in other words to think of which ideas to include, sequence them somehow and go on to flesh them out into sentences and ideally into a flowing script. And this is where the problems start since they have to follow a way of thinking and organisation which they are not familiar with and, if anything, they have meticulously struggled to circumvent.

Here are some suggestions about how to approach the task at hand. At the sentence level I choose a paragraph from a text that corresponds to the learner’s level of English and break down every sentence to single words which I then mix. I proceed to explain that they have to find the verb or verbs and potential subjects if there are more nouns or pronouns than the number of verbs, which is often the case (objects, adjuncts etc). I ask them to write down the verb(s) and the noun(s) and/or pronoun(s) that go with them on different lines of their notebook so that they can test another noun or pronoun if they don’t make sense. Then I get them to ask “what” or “who” in order to locate the object if there is one. Once they have sorted out those clusters of meaning they can get started on finding the adjectives qualifying the nouns of the sentence –again if there are any, and after doing so they can move on to the determiners (a/n, some, the, this etc) and put them before the right noun. I realise that this may leave out adjuncts or misplace determiners but at this stage I decide that they needn’t worry about small details as those aspects of grammar need to be looked at separately – perhaps once the learner has made some progress in untangling the basic clusters of meaning in a sentence.

Concerning the organisation of their ideas, I vary my methods. Some learners may be able to think of and arrange their ideas in an acceptable way. Others may have trouble doing so. In the latter case, I interfere by asking questions which will elicit some kind of continuity in their writing. Everything depends on the format of their writing and the topic. There are no hard-and-fast rules. Indeed each dyslexic learner is unique and so are the problems they come up against.

However, one tested method, which yields satisfactory results is to ask the learner to write down everything that comes to mind on the topic and then pick out what is strictly relevant to the topic and arrange the bits into paragraphs.

There are more aspects of writing that I work on separately such as punctuation, coordination and subordination. Those deserve a detailed analysis in their own right so I will elaborate on them in the immediate future.