Differentiation in the foreign language classroom : including students with disabilities in secondary foreign language classes

textForeign language teachers are not generally given information about how to work with students with disabilities. However, it is important for these students to have access to FL classes, both for the cognitive benefits that they offer and for path to higher education. This report offers my reflections on how to differentiate instruction in foreign language reading and writing to students with disabilities as well as typically developing students. I believe that both groups will benefit from the practices I describe here.Foreign Language Educatio

A Computer-Based Method to Improve the Spelling of Children with Dyslexia

In this paper we present a method which aims to improve the spelling of children with dyslexia through playful and targeted exercises. In contrast to previous approaches, our method does not use correct words or positive examples to follow, but presents the child a misspelled word as an exercise to solve. We created these training exercises on the basis of the linguistic knowledge extracted from the errors found in texts written by children with dyslexia. To test the effectiveness of this method in Spanish, we integrated the exercises in a game for iPad, DysEggxia (Piruletras in Spanish), and carried out a within-subject experiment. During eight weeks, 48 children played either DysEggxia or Word Search, which is another word game. We conducted tests and questionnaires at the beginning of the study, after four weeks when the games were switched, and at the end of the study. The children who played DysEggxia for four weeks in a row had significantly less writing errors in the tests that after playing Word Search for the same time. This provides evidence that error-based exercises presented in a tablet help children with dyslexia improve their spelling skills.Comment: 8 pages, ASSETS'14, October 20-22, 2014, Rochester, NY, US

Behavioral and neurophysiological effects of morphological awareness training on spelling and reading

Behavioral and neurophysiological effects of a computer-aided morphological training protocol were examined in German-speaking children from Grades 3 to 9. Study 1 compared morphological awareness, reading, and spelling skills of 34 trained children with an untrained control group of 34 children matched for age, sex, and intelligence. All participants in the training group showed increases in morphological awareness, but only students from secondary school improved significantly in reading and spelling competences. In Study 2, a subsample of 8 trained children with poor spelling and reading abilities and 10 untrained children with higher language competencies underwent an electroencephalography testing involving three different language tasks. The training resulted in decreased theta-activity and increased activity in lower (7-10Hz) and upper alpha (10-13Hz). These findings reflect more effortful and attention-demanding processing after the training and suggest that children with poor spelling and reading abilities use the acquired morphological knowledge in terms of a compensatory strateg

Dislexia: los retos y logros en la enseñanza del inglés como lengua extranjera

Traballo Fin de Grao en Lingua e Literatura Inglesas. Curso 2022-2023In the Spanish Educational System, the study of a second language is compulsory since Pre-School. Most schools in the country have English as the second language instructed among centres. Nevertheless, given the differences with their mother tongue, such as spelling and pronunciation, English can seem complex for students. Still, nothing compared to the difficulties faced by studies with dyslexia. According to the DSM-5-TR (2022), dyslexia is a learning disability characterised “by problems with accurate or fluent word recognition, poor decoding, and poor spelling abilities”. Consequently, teaching an L2 to those with difficulties with their L1 can become difficult for educators. The characteristics of the disability will help find better methods for students with dyslexia; in other words, studying the differences between people with dyslexia in Spanish and people with dyslexia in English will give us some insight into how the difficulties reflect so that we can assess them properly. Parallel to that, by looking at Spanish and British teaching approaches for children with dyslexia, we can see the student’s needs and the significant problems they face. Understanding the above is crucial to the paper’s central theme: teaching dyslexic children a second language. By studying the current methods used in Spain to teach English as a second language to children with dyslexia, we intend to show the advantages and disadvantages of each technique used nowadays and the challenges and accomplishments the students and educators could encounter in the process. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to show how dyslexia can affect the learning process not only in their mother tongue but also in a second language. In addition, we intend to illustrate how the structure of the Spanish Educational System and the currently available methods and strategies could imply challenges for children with dyslexi

Differences in Brain Function and Changes with Intervention in Children with Poor Spelling and Reading Abilities

Previous fMRI studies in English-speaking samples suggested that specific interventions may alter brain function in language-relevant networks in children with reading and spelling difficulties, but this research strongly focused on reading impaired individuals. Only few studies so far investigated characteristics of brain activation associated with poor spelling ability and whether a specific spelling intervention may also be associated with distinct changes in brain activity patterns. We here investigated such effects of a morpheme-based spelling intervention on brain function in 20 children with comparatively poor spelling and reading abilities using repeated fMRI. Relative to 10 matched controls, children with comparatively poor spelling and reading abilities showed increased activation in frontal medial and right hemispheric regions and decreased activation in left occipito-temporal regions prior to the intervention, during processing of a lexical decision task. After five weeks of intervention, spelling and reading comprehension significantly improved in the training group, along with increased activation in the left temporal, parahippocampal and hippocampal regions. Conversely, the waiting group showed increases in right posterior regions. Our findings could indicate an increased left temporal activation associated with the recollection of the new learnt morpheme-based strategy related to successful training

Screening dyslexia for English using HCI measures and machine learning

More than 10% of the population has dyslexia, and most are diagnosed only after they fail in school. This work seeks to change this through early detection via machine learning models that predict dyslexia by observing how people interact with a linguistic computer-based game. We designed items of the game taking into account (i) the empirical linguistic analysis of the errors that people with dyslexia make, and (ii) specific cognitive skills related to dyslexia: Language Skills, Working Memory, Executive Functions, and Perceptual Processes. . Using measures derived from the game, we conducted an experiment with 267 children and adults in order to train a statistical model that predicts readers with and without dyslexia using measures derived from the game. The model was trained and evaluated in a 10-fold cross experiment, reaching 84.62% accuracy using the most informative features.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft