teaching a foreign language to students with dyslexia

I’m not sure how much of an answer I have except that I have heard that there may be more English speaking dyslexics, because the language has many speakers (thus making the language have many more other language influences), and English has many irregularities in spelling and pronunciation. So that someone with no sign of dyslexia in one language could be dyslexic in English. In which case, I would assume that the dyslexia is milder.

As for getting her to read and write and spell it, how important is this to her? I know you are the English teacher, but maybe this is not so worth working on in her case. I am all for helping all kids, but this seems possibly to be a case of the remediation of the problem not really being worth the time and energy it would take.

—des

I do know that my students that seemed to have LDs that didn’t affect their reading or writing much at all still often *really* struggled with a foreign language. It was as if they learned their native tongue in some different way, but trying to be taught a foreign language was a pretty major disaster. So in a way they were much more dyslexic in their second langauge.

I would be patient and encouraging with her… and ENglish *is* a difficult language to learn. The more you can structure it and teach patterns, and perhaps cut back on teh quantity, the better it would be. Wouldn’t it be better for her to *really* learn half the content than to sort of get exposed to all of it?

I know that this doesn’t have anything to do with the original question but I often wonder about teaching a second language to students who are reading disabled. I know that it is a requirement for college admission and that worries me with my son.
I’m debating “asking” the high school to offer Sign Language as one of their foreign languages because I understand other area schools are offering this. My son is a visual learner (non-text) and has taken ASL in the past and did VERY well with it.
Have others of you pushed for ASL in your schools? Any thoughts/ experiences?

I have heard of this working out. However, keep in mind that ASL is not entirely free of ld challenges. I took it (not for course credit) and was so interested I was thinking of trying to be an interpreter. The teacher told me that she had never seen a ld person succeed at that and sort of steered me away from it. I did end up with some problems learning it in fact. Most of the time the signs have an active hand and a passive hand but you are seeing everything *backwards*. Unless the teacher is very patient you will have to learn them that way. The books and software are backwards as well. Also you don’t just need to be expressive, you need to “read it”. Reading is extremely hard due to the backwards thing and just about everybody is better expressively than receptively, about the only language I’d ever say that for. ASL, the only real sign language (well there is British sign language, etc), there is signing in English word order which is much easier, but may or may not be allowed as a language. Anyway ASL has its own unique grammar/ syntax. In my sentence: “He left for the bus at 8”, in ASL would be something like “8 he left (for) bus.”.

This is a more or less a warning that there ARE ld challenges. Directionality is not a dyslexic strong suit. And I have known of dyslexics learning it. And at least there is no written component.

hth ,

—des

Not all colleges accept ASL as meeting the foreign language requirement for admission. Be sure to check that out, especially since this policy can change.

Nancy