Dixlexia and how native speakers learn English.

Friday, 10  July 2015.

Dyslexia and learning English in a natural way

This day started with a lesson focused on dyslexia.  It was a good start because we had the chance to put ourselves in our dyslexic students ‘shoes by means of reading a passage and looking at a text as if we were dyslexic students. Definitely, it´s not easy and we needed help from the teacher.  In this sense, we spend the lesson revising techniques and manipulating materials which can help us to deal with dyslexia in the class.

We were lucky to get some great ideas, regarding to teaching management, to be applied in our classrooms such as: handing out papers in colored papers rather than white papers, checking using pencil and a code of symbols  for student´s self-checking, supporting teaching and meaning with the help of a variety of resources such as mini-books, mnemonics, a color code for each type of words, paper wheels, dominoes, word cards, spinners, cloth lines with words, pecks for apostrophes, songs and movements,…..and so son.

When reflecting on how effective can be using some of these materials in the Spanish classrooms, it should be noted that most of these resources, which are listed above, were hand-made materials created by the teacher such as dominoes, wheels, and cards and so on. Some of them were easy to do, cheap to buy and not very time-consuming, however, also some of them were not that cheap and very time consuming to be used in our classrooms very often. 

On the contrary, some other activities such as learning irregular verbs through rhythmic patterns of movements as well as very interesting speaking activities using simple charts were worth of trying to introduce them in our lessons in Spain.

After lunch, in the afternoon, during the last lesson, we spent some time reflecting on how native speakers learn English grammar through a natural acquisition process as well as in which order grammar is acquired by native speakers. I found having a look at this process very interesting because it made me think of the following considerations:

Should English grammar text books for non-native speakers follow their programming and lay out according to the stages in a natural process acquisition?

Should teachers of English as a second language to look at Students ‘grammar mistakes as just simple traces of different stages of acquisition?